Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick by Ken Iverson has become iconic in the business community. Published in 1997 and chronicling how Iverson transformed Nucor from near bankruptcy into America’s largest steel and steel products company, Plain Talk revolves around Iverson’s radical departure from traditional corporate hierarchies and his emphasis on trust, transparency and employee empowerment.

The book details management philosophy including “pain sharing” during economic downturns, where executives took substantial pay cuts instead of laying off workers, and a performance-based compensation system that made Nucor’s production employees the highest-paid in the industry while maintaining the lowest labor costs through exceptional productivity.

Throughout Plain Talk, Iverson shares practical lessons learned from both successes and failures, advocating for calculated risk-taking and treating setbacks as learning opportunities rather than disasters. Written without complex management theories or formulas, Plain Talk presents Iverson’s maverick approach as a blueprint for building competitive, innovative companies through employee autonomy, decentralized decision-making, and a culture where workers feel valued as essential contributors to the company’s success.

In Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, Nucor serves as a prominent example throughout the book, demonstrating key principles that distinguish great companies from merely good ones.
Nucor outperformed the market by over five times over 15 years, making it one of the 11 companies studied that successfully transitioned from good to great. Nucor exemplifies Jim Collins’ “Culture of Discipline” principle, demonstrating that rigorous standards combined with the right people and compensation structure can drive sustained excellence in even mature, competitive industries like steel manufacturing.

In 1991, acclaimed author Richard Preston (who had written The Hot Zone about the origins of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa) wrote American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt, chronicling the massive effort by Nucor, America’s then-ninth-largest steel company, to build a revolutionary new steel plant from the “ashes of the midwestern Rust Belt.” Preston visited Nucor in 1988 with the intention of writing a simple long-form article for The New Yorker. He became so interested in the company that he followed the opening of the Crawfordsville mill for two years, culminating in his writing of American Steel.

Nucor also has a rich history of its directors, an ongoing impressive ensemble of business and leadership titans, authoring and being the subject of books in their own right.

Peter C. Browning (Nucor Board of Directors 1999-2015) is the co-author of the defining treatise on corporate governance: The Director’s Manual: A Framework for Board Governance. The book is considered the touchstone for solving governance issues not based on a formula but understanding no two boards and the cultural dynamics that drive them are the same, requiring simultaneously flexibility and agility and also rigorous research-based information. During his tenure, Browning served as Non-Executive Chair, Lead Director, Chair of the Governance and Nominating Committee and Chair of the Audit Committee. He was instrumental in establishing Nucor’s board governance framework.

Dr. Jim Hlavacek (Nucor Board of Directors 1996-2013) has authored five books, the best-known being Market Driven Management: Prescriptions for Survival in a Turbulent World. He was considered an elder statesman of modern marketing, and his books are still highly regarded as roadmaps for companies suffering from business disruptions. Hlavacek was Nucor’s first independent director and served as the Audit Committee Chair for many years.

Retired Army Lieutenant General Nadja West, appointed to Nucor’s Board in 2019, is one of several women featured in the new children’s book: What Can Brown Girls Do? by Katelyn Williams. Released in early 2026, What Can Brown Girls Do? is the story of one young woman of color who is told she can’t do something by a classmate and begins a journey of discovery to see what Black and Brown girls before her had accomplished. Alongside General West, who served as the Surgeon General of the Army and the commanding general of the US Army Medical Command, What Can Brown Girls Do? features seven other Brown women including former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Two books by Dan DiMicco, Steeling America’s Future and American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness, are featured elsewhere in the museum.