ROLL DICE, NOT STEEL.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: Nucor bets big with strip casting

Nucor bets big, doubling down with strip casting. Its new CEO could show he's a winner - or crap out.

Daniel R. DiMicco crows about the future. President and CEO of Nucor Corp. for a year now, he boasts about a project he thinks can revolutionize not only his company but the entire steel industry. "I have no idea how big it can get," he says in the rat-a-tat-tat cadence of his native New York. "I just know that it will be very profitable, that it will have worldwide application."

It is a technology for making sheet steel -- raw material for everything from car fenders to refrigerator doors -- called strip casting. Henry Bessemer envisioned it when he invented the methods for modem steel making in the 19th century. Trouble is, nobody has been able to make it work commercially. If Nucor can, DiMicco, who's also vice chairman, will have quickly made his mark on a company famous for taking big risks and -- sometimes -- reaping big rewards.

Naysayers are legion. But they don't have the job once held by Ken Iverson, one of the industry's giants, a man who was literally a legend in his own time. Nor are they the handpicked successor to the man who toppled Iverson in a boardroom coup three years ago. Though strip casting is only a third of DiMicco's three-part plan to plump the Charlotte-based steel maker's waning profits -- the 51-year-old also wants to buy other companies and squeeze even more efficiency out of Nucor's streamlined mills -- strip casting, whether it flies or flops, likely will be a key part of his legacy. "If it doesn't work, it will be another situation where Nucor took a risk on something," he says. "It is not going to make or break the company. It won't make or break my career.

That's his spin. But if the experiment fails, so will DiMicco in his first high-profile test as CEO. Analysts and investors won't recall that strip casting was former CEO Dave Aycock's baby. Sure, Nucor is big enough, with $4.6 billion in 2000 sales and 8,000 employees, to absorb even the sizable bet the company is laying on strip casting. It is spending an estimated $105 million on a prototype plant in Crawfordsville, Ind., which should open in the first quarter of next year, and is prepared to spend $50 million more on ramping up.

And, yes, the company does have a culture of taking gutsy risks. Gambling on new technology helped make Nucor the nation's largest steel maker. Iverson bet big on minimills, one half the size of -- and much cheaper than -- traditional steel mills.

Under Iverson, Nucor went from near bankruptcy to being hailed as the savior of America's $45 billion steel industry. Minimills, which Nucor pioneered in 1969, weren't his only innovation. In 1989, Nucor built the world's first thin-slab caster. With the risk came reward: profits that one for-Mer Nucor executive described as obscene.

The company became a blueprint for the remodeling of corporate America: a lean, if not mean, operation with decentralized management. Iverson kept the unions out of his mills, which were built in rural areas, with bonuses and incentives. Nucor had some of the industry's highest-paid workers -- and lowest labor costs -- because its people were so productive.

Iverson liked to boast that roughly half the company's investments in new technology and ideas didn't pan out. But as he grew older, his critics claimed he became set in his ways and wouldn't let the company evolve. In 1998, Aycock, who had been Nucor's president and chief operating officer from 1984 to 1992, led the board revolt...