In 1997, 1 conducted a research interview with Ken Iverson, the CEO who led Nucor from obscurity into becoming the most profitable steel company in America. I particularly looked forward to our conversation, as the transformative power of technology had become an article of absolute faith in the church of the New Economy, and Nucor stood as a poster child for using technology to transform a business. Nucor not only generated returns to shareholders that beat the general market by more than five times, but it did so in an industry that ranked in the bottom 2 percent of industries in returns to shareholders during the same era. If ever there was a definitive case of technology as a key factor in upending the old order, this surely was it.
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