Blog Assignment #3

Blog Assignment 3: Read the article about Nucor Steel's social ecology. Discuss how can a company of your choice learn from Nucor Steel in pursuit of competitive advantage.

My current employer (Asurion) has a lot of the same characteristics as Nucor. One similarity is that they strive to attract and retain high-caliber talent. I think this is a common practice and is probably currently a lot easier in the current economy in that it is an employers market. They can be much more selective about who they higher due to higher unemployment but a lot of companies have always had this quality hiring/recruiting process. The key is hiring an employee with an internal locus of control who has an entrepreneurial spirit; and hiring lots of them. With Nucor, they have put a huge emphasis on social ecology and how they have done that is the foundation for their success. Using high-caliber employees that where held accountable but where in a culture that made it okay to make mistakes when you where trying something new. There compensation was a huge variable in their success also in that even employees at the production levels could get extremely high annual bonuses. They also were able to successfully bring in knowledge from the outside that complimented their internal goals and do so in such a way that it is not easily duplicated. 

Another thing that Nucor did that I feel that my current employer could improve on (and any other company) would be to improve on effective and efficient knowledge transmission channels. Even in companies with a flat organizational model that are team oriented it is not that uncommon for there to be knowledge “silos” that tend to form along the lines of classic functional departments. An example would be that employees in the finance department eventually become subject matter experts when it comes to data and systemic processes. This tacit knowledge is often difficult to transfer into “codified” knowledge and when it is there can be an interdepartmental disconnect. That is where IT at Nucor really changes things because they created a framework to facilitate the sharing of unstructured knowledge. Any company including my current employer can create a competitive advantage by finding a way to create an enterprise wide system sharing of unstructured knowledge.