6 Practical Ways Companies Are Redefining Efficiency
The iconic Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie built his considerable fortune and status as a manufacturing titan on the back of his insatiable pursuit of cost reduction through efficiency. After making a small fortune in the burgeoning rail industry, the young Carnegie was ready for his next opportunity. He had become privy to a revolutionary steel-making technique called the Bessemer process, which used molten pig iron to generate significantly higher output with a fraction of the labor. Carnegie built the first Bessemer plant in the United States in 1875 and subsequently went on a mergers-and-acquisitions spree, buying up inefficient steel manufacturers and converting them to Bessemer plants. Over a fifteen-year period, Carnegie reduced the cost of steel from $100 to $18 per ton and built the lions’s share of what would become the world’s first billion-dollar company: U.S. Steel. The introduction of the Bessemer process to the United States ushered i...