United States Steel: A Corporation with a SoulCotter, Arundel
History
United States Steel: A Corporation with a Soul
Cotter, Arundel
United States Steel Corporation
The early history of the Steel Corporation, therefore, will naturally
be found to have concerned itself largely with achieving these ends.
It is to a great extent the narrative of the various steps taken to
coördinate the more or less divergent units brought together in the
new Colossus of Steel, of the work that had to be accomplished, the
difficulties that had to be overcome, before it could fulfil its
_raison d’être_ and win the place it now occupies as the most important
business enterprise in the world.
Many dangers faced the new-born Corporation. Not the least of these,
although it was not realized at the time, was that, glorying in its
giant’s strength, it might use that strength mercilessly, like a giant.
Had it chosen so to do there is little doubt that it would have reaped
some immediate financial benefits, but events of later years proved
conclusively that it would have but laid the seeds for its own eventual
destruction. That the Corporation chose a different policy, and up to
that time one almost unknown in business, was due to the insistence of
Judge Gary.
And here it might be said that he did not have by any means an easy
time in convincing all of his co-directors that the policies he advised
should be adopted. For years he had a constant struggle, but gradually
he won over all of his opponents to this point of view.
Another of the dangers that beset the path of the new Corporation lay
in the fact that it was not an operating company with a number of
plants controlled by one central management, but a holding company
controlling by stock ownership a number of industrial units which had
previously been owned by utterly conflicting interests and each of
which continued necessarily to operate under a separate management.
The natural corollary of this state of affairs was that the management
of each constituent, or subsidiary company, troubled itself solely
about the success of its own particular unit and took little interest,
if any, in the affairs of the other subsidiaries or the success of the
Corporation as a whole. And had this condition continued the attainment
of the ends for which the Corporation was organized would have been
rendered impossible, its very existence made vain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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