I just stumbled across a 10 year old interview with the late Ken Iverson, long time CEO of U.S. steel manufacturer Nucor. His philosophy on management centres on keeping it simple. And it helped grow Nucor into a leader in its industry, and an outperformer of the market, from near bankruptcy in the 1960s. (Nucor is one of the primary examples used in Jim Collin’s must-read book, Good to Great).

Tom Brown, author of the article, isolated five of Iverson’s keys to managing simply (with my comments in italics):

• Destroy hierarchy: management exists to help workers do their jobs. In 2006, only 66 of Nucor’s nearly 12,000 employees were in head office.

• You need to trust to operate efficiently. Iverson believed in pushing decision making down to the lowest possible level. But you can only do that if you trust people to make the right decisions.

• Give workers a stake in the success of the business. Workers are rewarded financially for their productivity. But it’s not all about money. Job security, the chance to contribute and supportive management are also highly valued.

• Centralization vs decentralization is not the issue – decisiveness is. Which is probably why the centralization vs. decentralization debate has never ended!

• Don’t overlook the virtues of smallness. A similar formula for success has existed at Virgin.

Iverson’s thoughts, as expressed in the Harvard Management Update piece, might be 10 years old. But they are by no means out of date. Nor, sadly, are they any more commonly applied.