Terry S. Reynolds and Virginia P. Dawson, 2011
Iron Will: Cleveland-Cliffs and the Mining of Iron Ore
A hundred and fifty years of one company surviving an industry that killed almost everybody in it.
Lorenzo Ayres / 1 min
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Iron ore is about as brutal a business as exists. The price is set by somebody else, the capital costs are enormous, the assets cannot be moved, and the cycle can stay against you for a decade.
Cleveland-Cliffs went through all of it, repeatedly, from the 1840s onward, and the book is largely an account of how a company survives conditions it cannot control. The answer is mostly balance sheet and patience rather than brilliance, which is not the story anybody wants to hear.
I read it while we were working through our own debt and it was more useful than anything written about turnarounds, because the companies in those books always have a lever to pull and this one frequently did not.
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