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Chaparral Steel Essay

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Chaparral Steel differentiates itself from other minimills because of the various activities at which they excel and the relationship among these activities. Four central and interplaying activity themes were clear in the Chaparral Steel case and will be used to build our first framework. Before modeling the framework-related contributions of the Chaparral Steel case, we want to establish a baseline for our framework. The building blocks or foundation of the framework will be based on what we believe is a "framework tautology": all companies share a fundamental framework that consists of allocating resource to acquire inputs and adding value to them to produce an output, which will be purchased by one or more companies. Using this …show more content…

(Exhibit 1 – framework)

Leadership Facilitates the Rapid Translation of Technology into Product Referring to our framework, we clearly give credit to Chaparral Steel's leadership for having the valuable ability to quickly apply technological innovations to new products or processes that make product creation simpler and cheaper. Executive sponsorship of research and development initiatives must exist on many levels if it is to be useful, and Chaparral Steel's leadership was clearly committed to technology. They devoted funds over prolonged periods of time and tolerated a larger amount of failure than most steel companies would ever have considered acceptable. This higher tolerance for risk is understandable given the founders' mindset to break all the rules of big steel, adopt a flat organizational structure, decentralize decision making, treat everyone as a salesperson, share profits with all employees, and encourage creativity. The culmination of these values spread throughout the company and created a unique culture, unlike any other in the industry. Chaparral Steel's employees thrived in this environment and learned that ambiguity and change really meant opportunity. Problem solving became a cross-functional collaborative effort; when something broke, many ran to fix it, instead of finger pointing or

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