Nucor Steel Embodies All That's Best in Org Culture. June 27, 2024

Hello, my name is Ethan Chasen. I'm a New York-based organization development coach. As you all know, if you've ever checked in on my YouTube channel, I spent a considerable amount of time analyzing organizations that have done an amazing job building a world-class culture.

Today, I'm really excited because this is a company that I have admired for decades—literally. I was an MBA student back in the 90s and came across this organization doing a case study. Going on 30 years, they're still killing it in terms of building a great place to work and really, really doing an amazing job for their employees. So today, without further ado, I'm going to give a shout-out; I'm going to do an assessment of one of my favorite corporate entities in America: Nucor Steel.

Let's dive right in, and I hope you can take away from today's video some immediately actionable tips that you can start to think about applying in your organization. First off, we're going to dive right into their website to understand, at a basic level, who Nucor Steel is if you're not familiar with them. So they're North America's most diversified sustainable steel and steel products company. Their team is forged around a vision for leading our industry by providing unparalleled customer care, building trusted partnerships—and by partnerships, I mean with everybody, starting with their employees—and creating sustained value. That's it; that's who they are. And literally, you don't need to kind of question who they are or dig deep; you go to their website, front and center. That's one of the things I try to advise in my consulting practice with my clients: once you establish a reputational brand and you work extremely hard to build it, shout it out from the rooftops.

The mission at Nucor Steel is to grow the core, expand beyond, live our culture. You also know that this is a YouTube channel dedicated to organizational culture, and I focus on that. So a lot of the resources I'm going to share with you today about Nucor Steel is why they've spent, going on, you know, 60 years plus of building an amazing workplace culture. Our challenge is to become the world's safest steel company. That's a vision statement, actually, because you can't measure it, you can't quantify it, but it should resonate with the hearts and minds of your people, right? To become the world's safest steel company. We live each day with gratitude for the families, the customers, and the partners that make our work possible. In other words, they're giving a huge collegial corporate shout-out to the people that ensure that their organization has remained successful and competitive for decades. It's the people.

So I want to just kind of share with you the execution of their mission with a firm commitment to our team's members, their employees, and a variety of benefits and performance incentives. It's easy to see why Nucor Steel is named, and has been for decades, one of America's best employers. So they talk about their core values. If you know me and you and you watched any of the videos, I talk often about your culture is nothing more, nothing less than how your people act and behave in your organization on a daily basis. Well, you create the road map for that, as Nucor does, by setting out your guiding principles, your code of conduct. And for them, it's all about safety, teamwork, quality, strength, and the environment. And to it, right on their website, on their homepage, about them, on their company page, are famed values. Listen to some of these values; I mean, some of them you may have heard, or maybe you have in your organization: communication, teamwork, integrity. Okay, all right, those are pretty standard, right? They're pretty universal. But then they talk about things like personal responsibility and optimism. When was the last time you heard a billion-dollar corporation listing as one of its core values, optimism? For real, listen to this: Innovation—you've heard that—but what about treating people the right way? Treat people the right way? Are you kidding me? Yeah, they shout that out front and center; that's one of their aspirational values. They want to be held accountable for by their members, their employees: a can-do attitude, work ethic, pride in what we do. Okay, I'm not going to drill into detail on any of these. I wanted to give you a high, a high-level essence of what their stated code of conduct, their core values are, and to show you that it's a pretty rare blend of both Captain Obvious—which is innovation, teamwork, collaboration, for sure—but some of the other ones that maybe resonate for you in a way that your organization doesn't have, but maybe you want to consider: treating people the right way, optimism, and personal responsibility. Okay, that's it; that's the high level, right?

And then I want to kind of share with you that in the 1960s, Nucor founder Ken Iverson started a small steel company on the idea, the premise that members, teammates, employees—however you want to refer to them—customers and our communities can trust one another. Again, there's that word, trust. Fifty years later, going on 60 years later, because they were founded in 1958, right? It's got 66 years. We are America's largest steel producer. So while a lot has changed, we'd like to think very little has changed when it comes to what makes us who we are. To translate the outcome of us as an organization being successful, not just year over year, but decade over decade, is predicated on a fundamental starting philosophy we had, which was building on, creating the very strong core nucleus of culture and values and how we treat our people, the kind of people we bring in. And the financial success is not the goal; the financial success is an outcome of doing business on a consistently exceptional basis. In fact, they refer to it as the Nucor way.

So I want to dive into culture. So again, if you've watched my videos at all, if you've watched the organizations I've shined a spotlight on that do great things, or organizations that are struggling with their culture, you know that I've said repeatedly: culture is significantly more valuable to an organization than than strategy or operational efficiency. So I want to read a little bit about a book written by their former CEO, Ken Iverson, on building a different kind of company called Nucor Steel, right? So first, I want to go into the article's author talks about the problem with management and business and leadership books in general is that many of them point to things like culture, right, as the reason why organizations succeed, but actually successful organizations exist *because* of strong leadership, culture, the right way of doing things. And Phil Rosen wrote a book about this called *The Halo Effect*, which I highly recommend you read. But I want to kind of talk about that; he's, he points out, Rosen, in his book, attributes that we tend to think cause great performance—like culture, leadership, etc.—are often just vestiges or characteristics that can be attributed to companies that we already know are performing at a high level. So to say that Nucor Steel has been successful *because* of its culture falls into the trap of the halo effect. So what do I mean by that? So I want to kind of dive down here to Nucor Steel. So if you think about Nucor Steel, okay, the company is focused on steel; it's in the name. So if you think about some of the things that Ken Iverson, former CEO, said about his time leading Nucor Steel: our 7,000 employees are the best-paid employees, best-paid work in the industry, and yet Nucor Steel has consistently achieved the lowest labor cost, the lowest cost for labor of a ton of steel produced. So that gives them operational efficiency right there, but it also demands that you hire people who are focused, they have a track record of success being focused on being highly productive and perform at a high level. Nucor, a Fortune 500 company, sales in excess of 3.6 billion, and yet they just had a total, at the time that this article was written, 22 people in their corporate headquarters in North Carolina, and only four layers, at the time—I think it's up to five now—of management. Five layers of management from the CEO all the way down to their frontline staff. You know that I've talked in the 21st century repeatedly about in your business: getting those administrative, hierarchical, bureaucratic levels, get them the hell out of your pyramid and flatten it. Create a flatter matrix organization between the top and those people who are performing the work, because you'll automatically create operational efficiency, but it'll force you to find the right people for the right roles and hire on an entirely different set of characteristics of qualities.

So I want to talk a little bit more about Ken Iverson, former CEO, um, of Nucor Steel, in his book. And so if you think about one of the key attributes that I just mentioned of flattening the organization, Nucor Steel has believed and still functions this way: in decentralization. We talked about 22 people in their headquarters, four billion dollars in revenue, okay? But I want to read a little bit more about what that means in terms of business process. So in terms of shrinking down the hierarchy, shrinking down that command and control to really remove all the redundancy and waste of administrative bureaucracy, each division of Nucor Steel operates one or two plants as a functionally independent entity. They procure their own raw materials, they create their own marketing strategies, they find their own customers, they set their own production quarters. And so this is something, this is a riff, a permutation of something you may have heard me say, which I need to repeat: those who are closest to the market, those who are closest to the work, those who live in the communities in which they work and serve understand a hell of a lot more clearly than your corporate or senior leadership team does how to operate at optimum, maximum performance and productivity efficiency, which will in turn fuel higher profitability. Okay? So now this concept of giving control away to the people who do the work scares the hell out of a lot of organizations—not Nucor—but these other organizations that struggle to remain relevant post-COVID. They're not willing to allow their local general managers that kind of control and responsibility. The allure of synergy and the allure of top-down control, which is a 20th-century industrial manifestation and no longer exists in the 21st century, but the appeal of that outdated command and control pyramid structure, it's too strong for a lot of organizations to break free of once it's in place. Headquarters culture has a way of taking on a life of its own. And so you think of other corporate entities that don't have this kind of decentralized structure that Nucor has been working on for decades; it's not a Johnny-come-lately. Listen to what Ken Iverson, at the time, said, former CEO of Nucor, about this decentralization framework or mindset at Nucor Steel: "We're honestly God-autonomous," said a GM, which was a division of Nucor. That means that we duplicate efforts made in other parts of Nucor that are presumed to be successful or efficient. The company might develop the same computer program six times, but the advantages, the advantages of us in our local divisions, our local, you know, we're autonomous, they're so great, the benefits of giving up control to the people in their local markets at Nucor, it's worth that kind of duplicate effort that may happen at, uh, on a number of divisions throughout the business. And you know, if you've ever worked in Corporate America, you know how unusual this is. Okay? So this is the kind of stuff that's going on at Nucor and has for decades. It's simplistic operational efficiency predicated on a fundamentally different mindset than most corporations, where instead of command and control to dictate the terms of how your people work, where they work, when they work, how to get the work done, it's that whole Daniel Pink model of giving up true autonomy. You can call it unrecognized simplicity. Nucor corporate overhead expense is so small that they don't even bother allocating corporate expenses to their divisions throughout the country. That's a rare concept. The other underappreciated value of decentralized control at Nucor is that great ideas tend to rise from the bottom. Can't say this enough: your people who are closest to the work understand how to do it in such a way as to be most efficient, most productive, perform at a high level, and therefore drive your profitability. That's why, throughout my 15 years of consulting practice, one of the core entities of a workforce audit that I've always tried to do, implement at my clients, is to encourage them to shift the work and shift the control and autonomy down to the people and do things like idea generation programs, fund and solicit their ideas. They know how to do the work at optimal efficiency; they know new products and services to offer; they know how to generate new revenues; they know how to go into new markets, find new clients; and at the same time, they know how to perform at an optimal, efficient level to reduce costs. So you're hitting your bottom line two ways by giving up control, as Nucor has been doing for decades. You let people determine the ideas to drive revenue—it's a top-line impact—and you enable them to reduce cost by coming up with ideas, which is a bottom-line impact. You hit them high and low by giving up control.

So what's the result of that? What's the result of that in terms of, okay, Nucor has been doing this for decades, as I said. I've been in love with them since the early 90s. What is the impact in terms of their culture? In terms of how their people think about their relationship with Nucor? Well, going to Great Place to Work, one of my go-to websites to start to get a handle on employee engagement, feelings of positivity: 80% of all employees, surging 87%—now this was kind of updated a few years ago, right after COVID—but 2021, 87% of employees think that their company is a great place to work. So Nucor Steel is America's most diversified steel and steel product company. Since 1969, they have led the steel industry in developing innovative technology for recycling scrap into high-quality steel. And we're going to talk about the other benefit that gives them of going up and down the supply chain in terms of having control over a very cyclical industry. Okay? So 19,000 employees—I mentioned back in the 1990s they were at close to 7,000—exponential growth. Okay? So when you take a, take a look—this is three years ago—you take a look at the composition of employees at Nucor Steel based on tenure, look at the numbers: less than two years, 16%; two to five years, 25%; six to ten years, it's evenly distributed amongst those people who have tenure that comprise the five-generation American workforce, from matures born before World War II to Gen Z born between '96 and 2010. They really are a really nicely distributed baseline of experience, which makes it easier, I would imagine at Nucor, to line up employees in terms of new tenure and very tenured in terms of coaching, mentoring, sponsoring. It makes it a lot easier to do intellectual capital sharing by having employees, members, partner with each other and work in a team-based, collaborative environment. But when you look at the corporate culture, the satisfaction of employees, there's 87% positive. I, I don't know if that resonates with you; the industry standard in American enterprises is 57%. Boom! But then wait a second: if you look at how, in how satisfied employees are when you talk about key metrics that they were surveyed on, I believe: Management would lay people off only as a last resort, 92%. I'm going to talk to you in a minute about why that's impactful. This is a company, as I said, that's been around for 66 years, never implemented layoffs, never closed manufacturing plants, never once. 92% of employees said, "I'm proud to tell other people I know I work there." 92% said, "From the moment I join, I'm made to feel welcome." 91%: "When I look at what I've accomplished at Nucor Steel, I feel a sense of pride." 89%: "People here are given a lot of responsibility." Trust me when I say I worked in Corporate America for 20 years in the private sector; I've done 15 years of coaching over 500 organizations. If I ask these five questions to any of my previous employers, or any I've had any of my clients do this, and I've done this on occasion, those kind of numbers are obscene; they're unheard of. And then when you ask—I'm not going to go into it—but when you ask employees what is it you like about working there, imagine if this was your organization; imagine if this was your organization, constantly, constantly year-over-year identified as the best place to work. It's there, um, you know, giving you another perspective because I like to be a little bit, um, objective about this. So you go, go to Comparably, and there were 360 Nucor Steel employees surveyed, and they got an aggregate A+ rating. What does that mean? On a scale of one to five, one is a low employee rating, like horrific; five is the top, can't do any better. An aggregate 4.8 out of five score, or an A+ rating for 360 employees who took the time to go online to Comparably and talk about their experience at Nucor. In fact, Leon Topalian, their CEO, their current CEO, has a ranking, a positivity ranking of 91 out of 100. Go ahead and put your company's performance metrics up against this. But when you look at it in terms of different categories of employee satisfaction, women at Nucor Corporation have rated happiness, executive team, and CEO rating as the highest categories. Diversity at Nucor Steel, diverse employees at Nucor Corporation rated executive team, team, team, and happiness is, I mean, you can't make this up. Like you may have heard me talk about Net Promoter Score, right? A Net Promoter Score is you ask your employees on a scale of one to ten, one is absolutely not, ten is absolutely: How likely would you be to refer a family or good friend to come work for our company? 6%, 6% said one to six on a scale of one to ten. Only 14% were neutral; they rated on a scale of one to ten, seven or eight, likely to refer somebody. And 80% of all employees said nine or ten on a scale of one to ten. 80% of people said, "I would definitely refer somebody to this organization." You don't get numbers like that. When you look at the culture in terms of category: CEO ranking, gender diversity, happiness, future outlook, professional development, compensation, I mean, it's all A+. It's across the board. It's an established organizational culture predicated on exceeding their people's highest expectations. I mean, you go to Glassdoor, right? And you all know that in terms of me not being biased and having an objective perspective, I'll go to a third source for employee reviews. And so Glassdoor, on a scale of one to five, 90% of people surveyed—and there were 673 reviews—90% said that they would recommend it, and the aggregate score, on a scale of one to five, anything over four is exceptional on that kind of scaling model, 4.4 aggregate response rate favorability. And then you just look at some of the things, you just look at some of the questions, you know, in terms of ethnicity, on a scale of one to five, you know, Asians, 4.7; Hispanic, 4.9, or Latinx; you know, African-American, 3.8; white, 3.9. I mean, it's all kind of bunched up in that really strong category, uh, of favorability. I'm not going to go into the comments, but you're starting to get a picture now. I want to go into the details of the business model; what are the lessons that you can take away from Nucor Steel and apply into your business? I'm going back a little bit; it's a fairly old article written in 1998. At the time, CEO of Nucor, John Correnti, I want to give you a little bit of historical, decade-over-decade perspective to take it up to the current. I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that he wrote in a website called Impremis, which is his public… I want to talk a little bit about something he wrote. So this was predicated at the end of fiscal year 1997. So Nucor sales in 1997 exceeded 4.2 billion, profited 294 million. We've never closed a plant or laid off any of our 6,900 employees—now 19,000—but I'm giving you historical: never, ever closed a plant, never, ever laid off a single employee. I dare you to compare your organization, by the way, whether you're an SMB with like 50 employees, 500, 5,000, you, you're really, it's almost impossible to compete with this kind of positive culture. So I want to talk to you a little bit about something: the key to Nucor's, Nucor Steel's success, the culture of our company, and this is John Correnti, former CEO, one that we plan to extend into the next century. 6,900 employees in 1998, 16,000 now. Our philosophy, particularly in regard to management employees, is that management has the obligation—I'm going to read this more slowly than I do—management has the obligation to provide its employees with the opportunity to earn according to their productivity and to manage the company properly so that if employees work hard and do their job properly, the job security is assured. Meritocracy: people who are hired because of past track record of success and people who are rewarded, compensated, bonused, maybe even promoted based on measurable performance, such as production of a ton of steel. Money can't be the only incentive; it never is, by the way. If you read any of SHRM or Association for Training Development's annual surveys of hundreds of thousands of employees, when they ask what are the most important aspects to you, money, on, on a, let's say, a ten-criteria rating is nothing more than, nothing higher than five or six. It's not about the money, especially for Gen Z and Millennials. Money cannot be the only incentive to increase productivity, but it certainly is the best, or one of them. Employees who have trouble maintaining a modest standard of living and who do not know how many weeks they're going to work in a given year will be less productive in order to extend their stay and their paychecks, and that's a lethal trend in a capital-intensive industry like steel where fixed assets are high and the amount of tons produced is critical. That's how they keep score at Nucor: the amount of tons produced. But when employees see that working hard means they're not working themselves out of a job and are actually enhancing their job security by being productive, their productivity will always rise. As such, check this out: listen, what can you extrapolate or take away from this to apply into your workforce? Nucor offers a variety of incentive programs and programs to enhance productivity. So it's not one-size-fits-all; it's a custom productivity-incentivized program. Okay? Their incentive program focuses on groups of 40 to 60 people rather than on individuals. Nucor establishes a minimum acceptable level of tons produced and pays a bonus based on the degree to which people in that productivity band or tier exceed their baseline standard. There are usually seven different bonus or standardized productivity groups: three for people employed in a role to melt the steel, three for rolling the steel, and then one for the maintenance department. Our philosophy is that we put each bonus group into a business for itself. We provide the training, the capital, the know-how, the equipment, but what each group makes is directly proportional to its own productivity and how it runs its business. So remember before when I said that the autonomy given employees and the shrinking of the, the, the pyramid, command-and-control model, it's decentralized intentionally to achieve this, where each plant, or two, in an area is its own functional entity. We also have incentive programs for people not directly in production, such as draftsmen, clerks, accountants, engineers, and our measurement of their performance is return on assets. Again, if minimum standards are exceeded, secretaries, clerks, and accountants can receive as much as 28% in bonus. How do you do this? Forget about the specific details pertinent to, to Nucor. How do you do this in your organization? It's a rhetorical question. Do you do this? I have clients who don't have performance management plans; they don't have KPIs or goals; their senior leadership sets goals for everybody, which is the stupidest thing to do; it's so self-defeating. Taking stock of the company even more shocking perhaps is the fact that our senior officers are not offered employment contracts. Say it again: our senior executives are not offered employment contracts, golden parachutes, or option retirement plans. Instead, they're offered Nucor stock. This benefit program is solely based on the job we do for the real owners of the company. The minimum is an 88.5%, the maximum 22%. One-sixth of my—this is CEO John Correnti—one-sixth of my annual remuneration is fixed; the rest is at risk based on return of stockholder equity. Three-quarters is paid in cash. So I mean, wake up, Wall Street; this is a precedent other companies should be following; they don't, and they should also consider duplicating our employee profit sharing. If there's no profit, there's nothing to share. Okay? We can't put anything at the profit sharing if we're not profitable, but they have been, decade over decade, year over year. In fact, the article was written for fiscal year 1997; Nucor contributed that year 46 million, or 10% of its pre-tax profit to the employee trust. And so if you think about this, the motivation, the compensation from the top down is driven on meritocracy of productivity and success, and they shrink their administrative function. So when you go to their headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, you'll see a very small team because they decentralized. And I want to share the last, before I move on, of this: organizations of the future. So aside from their generous incentive program and how they strip down their administrative overhead, they also have special attributes that distinguish them and have for a long time as the prototype for a post-COVID, 21st-century Corporate America. Lines of communication are open and informal; employees can pick up the phone or text the CEO any time to discuss their concerns. Employees and management trust each other, which may sound crazy, I know it doesn't to a lot of my clients. We discuss small and big decisions with employees openly and honestly. The word for that is transparency. Once we've made up our minds, we don't change them because of pressure or threats. Once you make a decision, obviously you have to be flexible, but you don't keep vacillating back and forth. Many companies think they have to be located in major cities because of large population density. Nucor thinks the opposite, or contrary, takes the contrarian perspective. We've gone to rural America, not because the labor is cheap, for example. We employ 450 people in Leon County, Texas, which the population is 17,000. When we built it in '75, we got 5,000 job applications from Houston, Dallas, San Antonio. People had been forced to move away from Leon County. The real reason companies go to the big cities is because that's where their executives want to live, where there are these nice amenities or quality of life. The companies locate there to satisfy a minority number of senior executives, and they piss off a majority of their employees. If a company can provide a good-paying, stable, secure environment, anyone would love to stay in their hometown. For every five years of employment, we reward employees with five shares of stock; ten years, ten… builds in, builds in commitment and tenure, ideally of those people who are again high-functioning rock stars; they possess, um, all the attributes of success. So that's kind of where I wanted to lead off on there. Now I want to talk about Nucor's organizational culture. This, to me, is fascinating. What Nucor management has been able to do is get workers to identify their own interests fundamentally with those of management, something that managers have been attempting to do and not very successfully since the dawn of industry, said Ted Kuster, former CEO of Nucor, Dan DiMicco after John Correnti in 2001. Other companies can buy the similar equipment that we have, but the culture is uniquely ours. The culture is ours; nobody else can replicate this culture that we spend day in and day out for 66 years to develop. It's a constant, evolutionary, organically changing entity, but it stays, it holds fast to its roots, its values, its core identity and ideology. Think about this: it makes an unusual cover to an annual report. Instead of attractive photographs on the cover page, the company puts the names of all its employees on the front and back covers. The company's Nucor Corp, the largest producer of steel in North America; it's known for its culture and its commitment to its employees. In the age of downsizing and layoffs, Nucor has not laid off a single employee nor shut down any of its plants. It's also credited with not reporting a loss in any business quarter for the last 30 years, shut up, from 1972 to 2002. So this is going back 22 years. Both analysts and company sources attribute the company's success over the years to its culture. Okay? So Nucor's established a fair grievance redressal system, redressal system, which allows any employee to approach the management with his or her or their complaints. Analysts are of the opinion that Nucor is a perfect example of how a company's organizational culture can influence performance. I mean, I'm going on and on, obviously, about the organization from a twofold perspective: one is, I've admired them and followed them for decades, right? For that, that's given; that's inside; put that aside. Can you, as you're listening to any of this, extrapolate ideas where your organization may be able to literally steal some of this best practice? Or is it me talking through this, probing you with rhetorical questions to get you to start thinking about how to unstick your organization, how to free up and unleash your people's untapped potential? Because all the tools you need are already there; they're in place. So that's, that's the last thing I'll mention is going back to last year. Okay? We went full, historically full circle, 1958 when the company was founded to 2023. This goes back, this article to September. So Carson George is the author, *The Future of Tech Strategy: Embracing Nucor Steel's Legacy of No Layoffs, Unyielding Efficiency, and a Union-Free Environment*. So Nucor, beacon of the American steel industry, not only stands out for its innovative production methods, like, like mini-mills and electric arc furnace processes—I'll, I'll mention it in a moment—but also for its revolutionary corporate strategy. Initially, initially going back well before 1958 when it started as a steel company, back in 1905, it started as an automobile company. It's displayed throughout its history an exceptional ability to adapt and innovate, venturing through diverse industries before securing its current and stronghold on steel production. It's dedicated to its workforce; I've talked about that; it's never laid off an employee; it manages, it operates efficiently without the need for labor unions; no bloated bureaucracy of administration at headquarters; um, it doesn't need its employees don't need to unionize because they're treated with respect, civility, and, and equitable employee-employer work contract. Financial robustness: the company's commitment to its shareholders is evident; it's consistently delivered dividends for over 50 years. Can you match up from a financial performance model, assuming you're a publicly traded company? Operational efficiency: despite the intricacies of the steel industry, it's very variable, as cyclical, Nucor operates with about 50% more efficiency than its US-based peers. You, you, you can't, as you start to benchmark your performance relative to your competitors, you can't start, as most organizations do, with strategy or operational efficiency; start with your people strategy; it all is driven there. So I talked about decentralization; they remove all those layers of management and bureaucracy to empower their employees; it creates more innovation, quicker decision-making, and improves organizational communication. It's relatively easy to adopt these, but you got to start; you got to start. We're at the end of June 2024, June 27th; you got to start; you've had a, you've had a half a year; you've got a half a year left in 2024. Drive performance through employee empowerment. I say this all the time to clients and prospects: Nucor Steel drives performance by empowering employees and linking rewards to their achievements. It's a culture of meritocracy; reward performance, not relationships; it's not driven by nepotism. Nucor believes in sharing critical information with all its employees, including financial data, market trends, strategic plans. Employees need to have and receive a better understanding of the business and their role in it. It makes them, in a decentralized fashion, when they have more autonomy and control, to make more informed decisions that positively impact performance. Three: cultivate a cohesive culture. It's all about a culture of fairness and unity. Okay? There's no, or they eliminate a lot of potentially divisive executive perks, and they create, therefore, a sense of togetherness throughout the company. And management is evolved over the years; they facilitate; they're not micromanagers; it's not about control and creating a toxic workplace where you pay your employee something called indentured servitude—a paycheck to reward them for you abusing them—uh-uh. Embark on the innovation risk journey. You're constantly assessing opportunities, threats. Nucor's approach emphasizes the importance of embracing risk and understanding that failures are valuable learning opportunities for its people. They encourage employees to explore new ideas, experiment, push boundaries in search of innovative solutions. Remember that's a core value: innovation. Nucor understands that not every attempt will be successful, but they view failures as stepping stones towards future progress and innovation. And it's all driven by a sense of ethical behavior. Nucor believes in ethical operations that balance equity, righteousness, and practicality. Respect for their people, high ethical standards; they promote honesty, integrity, and ethical behavior. And this is the kind of stuff that I wanted to highlight.

So long story short, I've been following Nucor Steel for, for decades. The takeaway, though, is there's so much amazing, actionable best practice they've been doing year after year, decade after decade, that you can literally take, extrapolate out of their business model and say, "We're not in the same industry; we're not in the same sector; we don't already have their track record of historical success," but nonetheless, we want to move forward with some of these practices. So if you like this video, please, please, please subscribe to the channel. This is how I get support to keep doing this organizational assessment of places like Nucor that have amazing cultures. Also share this video with other people; be sure to like it, comment. But thank you for stopping in today to check out this video, and please, please, please, when you're ready to go chasing the dream, check out my other playlist and my first two seasons of our podcast. Thank you.