MAY 1, 2006
SPECIAL REPORT
|
What you can learn from a company that
treats workers like owners. Inside the surprising
performance culture of steelmaker Nucor |
It was about 2 p.m. on Mar.
9 when three Nucor Corp. electricians got the call from their colleagues at the
Hickman (
No supervisor had asked them to make the trip, and no one had to. They went on their own. Camping
out in the electrical substation with the Hickman staff, the team worked
20-hour shifts to get the plant up and running again in three days instead of
the anticipated full week. There wasn't any direct
financial incentive for them to blow their weekends, no extra money in their
next paycheck, but for the company their contribution was huge. Hickman went on to post a first-quarter record for tons of
steel shipped.
What's most amazing about this story is that at Nucor it's not considered
particularly remarkable. "It could have easily
been a Hickman operator going to help the Crawfordsville [
In an industry as Rust Belt as they come, Nucor has nurtured one of the most
dynamic and engaged workforces around. The 11,300
nonunion employees at the Charlotte (N.C.) company don't see themselves as
worker bees waiting for instructions from above. Nucor's
flattened hierarchy and emphasis on pushing power to the front line lead its
employees to adopt the mindset of owner-operators. It's
a profitable formula: Nucor's 387% return to shareholders over the past five
years handily beats almost all other companies in the Standard & Poor's
500-stock index, including New Economy icons Amazon.com, Starbucks, and eBay. And the company has become more profitable as it has
grown: Margins, which were 7% in 2000, reached 10% last year.
Nucor gained renown in the late 1980s for its radical pay practices, which base
the vast majority of most workers' income on their performance. An upstart nipping at the heels of the integrated steel
giants, Nucor had a close-knit culture that was the natural outgrowth of its
underdog identity. Legendary leader F. Kenneth
Iverson's radical insight: that employees, even hourly
clock-punchers, will make an extraordinary effort if you reward them richly,
treat them with respect, and give them real power.
Nucor is an upstart no more, and the untold story of how it has clung to that
core philosophy even as it has grown into the largest steel company in the U.S.
is in many ways as compelling as the celebrated tale of its brash youth. Iverson retired in 1999. Under
CEO Daniel R. DiMicco, a 23-year veteran, Nucor has
snapped up 13 plants over the past five years while managing to instill its
unique culture in all of the facilities it has bought, an achievement that
makes him a more than worthy successor to Iverson.
Nucor's performance, propelled by a red-hot steel market, has been nothing less
than sensational. It has grown into a company with
2005 sales of $12.7 billion, up from $4.6 billion when DiMicco
took over in 2000. Last year net income was $1.3
billion, up from $311 million in 2000. In 2005 the
company shipped more steel in the
At Nucor the art of motivation is about an unblinking focus on the people on
the front line of the business. It's about talking to
them, listening to them, taking a risk on their ideas, and accepting the
occasional failure. It's a culture built in part with
symbolic gestures. Every year, for example, every
single employee's name goes on the cover of the annual report.
And, like Iverson before him, DiMicco flies
commercial, manages without an executive parking space, and really does make
the coffee in the office when he takes the last cup. Although
he has an Ivy League pedigree, including degrees from
At times, workers and managers exhibit a level of passion for the company that
can border on the bizarre. Executive Vice-President
Joseph A. Rutkowski, an engineer who came up through
the mills, speaks of Nucor as a "magic" place, representing the best
of American rebelliousness. He says "we epitomize
how people should think, should be." EVP Ferriola goes even further: "I consider myself an
apostle" for the gospel of Ken Iverson. "After
Christ died, people still spread the word. Our culture
is a living thing. It will not die because we will not
let it die, ever."
Strategic Highflier
Unusual? No Doubt. But Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at
At a time when many observers are busy hammering the final nail into the coffin
of American heavy manufacturing, Nucor's business model is well worth
considering. It raises the question of whether
troubled companies such as General Motors (GM ) and Ford (F ) -- not to mention nonmanufacturers such as Delta Airlines (DALR ) or Verizon Communications (VZ ) -- could energize their
workers by adopting some version of this plan. But
Nucor's path is hard to follow. It requires managers
to abandon the command-and-control model that has dominated American business
for the better part of a century, trust their people, and do a much better job
of sharing corporate wealth.
Money is where the rubber meets the road. Nucor's
unusual pay system is the single most daring element of the company's model and
the hardest for outsiders and acquired companies to embrace. An
experienced steelworker at another company can easily earn $16 to $21 an hour. At Nucor the guarantee is closer to $10.
A bonus tied to the production of defect-free steel by an employee's
entire shift can triple the average steelworker's take-home pay.
With demand for steel scorching these days, payday has become a regular cause
for celebration. Nucor gave out more than $220 million
in profit sharing and bonuses to the rank and file in 2005. The
average Nucor steelworker took home nearly $79,000 last year.
Add to that a $2,000 one-time bonus to mark the company's record
earnings and almost $18,000, on average, in profit sharing. Not
only is good work rewarded, but bad work is penalized. Bonuses
are calculated on every order and paid out every week. At
the Berkeley mill in Huger, S.C., if workers make a bad batch of steel and
catch it before it has moved on, they lose the bonus they otherwise would have
made on that shipment. But if it gets to the customer,
they lose three times that.
Managers don't just ask workers to put a big chunk of their pay at risk. Their own take-home depends heavily on results as well. Department managers typically get a base pay that's 75% to
90% of the market average. But in a great year that
same manager might get a bonus of 75% or even 90%, based on the return on
assets of the whole plant. "In average-to-bad
years, we earn less than our peers in other companies. That's
supposed to teach us that we don't want to be average or bad.
We want to be good," says James M. Coblin,
Nucor's vice-president for human resources.
Compared with other
Executive pay is geared toward team building. The
bonus of a plant manager, a department manager's boss, depends on the entire
corporation's return on equity. So there's no glory in
winning at your own plant if the others are failing. When
EVP Ferriola became general manager of Nucor's Vulcraft plant in
This high-stakes teamwork can be the hardest thing for a newly acquired plant
to get used to. David Hutchins, a frontline supervisor
or "lead man" in the rolling mill at Nucor's first big acquisition,
its Auburn (N.Y.) plant, describes the old way of thinking. The
job of a rolling mill is to thin out the steel made in the hot mill furnace,
preparing it to be cut into sheets. In the days before
the Nucor acquisition, if the cutting backed up, Hutchins would just take a
break. "We'd sit back, have a cup of coffee, and
complain: 'Those guys stink,"' he says. "At
Nucor, we're not 'you guys' and 'us guys.' It's all of
us guys. Wherever the bottleneck is, we go there, and
everyone works on it."
It took six months to convince
The payoff for Nucor? In
But to focus only on pay would be to miss something special about the culture
Nucor has created. There's a healthy competition among
facilities and even among shifts, balanced with a long history of cooperation
and idea-sharing. Rick Ryan, the shipping department
supervisor at the Auburn mill, has taken trips to study plants in
Since there's always room for improvement, plant managers regularly set up
contests for shifts to try to outdo one another on a set goal, generally
related to safety, efficiency, or output. Ryan says
Nucor's
In-House Entrepreneurs
As Nucor grows, existing facilities making products that overlap with those of
acquired plants may need to find new businesses to branch into. So Nucor employees have to innovate themselves out of
tough spots and into more profitable ones. The
Crawfordsville plant is among those that have felt the squeeze. It's famous as the place that pioneered the
commercialization of the thin-strip casting of steel that made it possible for minimills such as Nucor to compete with the industry's Old
Guard. But Crawfordsville is not on a large waterway,
a disadvantage at a time of high fuel costs. As
Nucor's oldest sheet mill, it can't make sheets as wide as many of Nucor's
other mills, including a giant plant in
So General Manager Ron Dickerson has focused more of Crawfordsville's output on
types of steel that are harder to make, more profitable, and less threatened by
imports. Now, Crawfordsville can make 160 different
grades of steel. Those with a high carbon content, for
example, are stronger and lighter and are particularly useful for steel ties
for shipping and in car parts. It took a lot of work
to figure out how to make this type of steel, which is prone to crack in
mid-production, but workers agitated for the chance. They
wanted more work for the plant so they could get more hours. Nucor's
giant
Like many employees, Hall sometimes sounds like a walking advertisement for
Nucor. Whisking a visitor out of his office and onto
the factory floor, he mentions that he often walks through the plant on
Saturday mornings at 5 or 6 a.m. to chat with the line workers before having
breakfast with his children at 9 a.m. "I can give you all the rhetoric you
want," says Ladd, "but the people in the mills, that's what makes it
Nucor."
By Nanette Byrnes, with Michael Arndt in