One Step Upward, Another Back

In a previous post, I reminisced about my experience working with an extraordinary entrepreneur named Willy Korf. Sadly, he died much too young, killed at age sixty-one when his private plane flew into a mountainside near Innsbruck in the fall of 1990. I had logged many miles with the same crew that perished with him that day.

Korf was a pioneer in the unglamorous business of steelmaking. He was unconventional and attention-grabbing. He is acknowledged as having been the “father” of the modern “mini-mill.” He stood in stark contrast to one of his contemporaries, Ken Iverson, a conservative Midwesterner who founded what is now the largest steel company in the US, Nucor. I was fortunate to have befriended Ken. Though I never worked with him, we traveled together a few times and played tennis together often.

Iverson retired from the company he founded in 1998 and passed away a few years later. He was seen to have taken the insights and innovations pioneered by Korf and applied them brilliantly. The two men could not have been more different.

After Korf’s tragic death, an international steel organization created the Willy Korf Steel Vision Award to honor individuals who have made significant contributions to the steel industry while promoting goodwill and integrity. The first recipient was Ken Iverson. Following Iverson’s death, the award was renamed the Willy Korf/Ken Iverson Steel Vision award.

I was also lucky to have met a fascinating businessman named Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian-born, London-based billionaire who leads what is now the largest steel company the world has ever seen. During a memorable trip to South American with him in his private jet, we talked about Korf and Iverson and their legacies. Mittal was honored with the award named for Korf and Iverson in 1998.

About ten years ago, I began writing a book about these three incredible people whose careers had been so intertwined and whose paths I had crossed. I wrote from my own first-hand experiences with them. I constructed the triple-bio as a parallel to the process of globalization, with Korf as a visionary, but struggling European eclipsed by a daring American relentlessly focused on cost-efficiency and while Mittal was the brash Asian who surpassed them both by adopting the best characteristics of the two giants on whose shoulders he had stood. Brilliant, I was sure!

I asked my wife to read an early draft. She was an English teacher (recently retired from The University of North Carolina-Charlotte after 35 years) and a published author of non-fiction. She is also very kind. After her reading her comments went like this: “Not so badly written; it may appeal to at most two or three people in addition to you!”

So that work sits on a shelf in my office. If I ever get to the plateau section of this learning curve, I intend to pull it down, complete it and publish it. Those two or three others deserve that from me.