As the Chairman of Erdemir’s Executive Board, Dr. Argüden brought new perspectives and vision to the largest Turkish steel company. He has brought an international perspective to the company’s vision and helped to enhance management quality by focusing on value creation rather than engineering; on growth by mergers and acquisitions rather than by greenfield investments; and initiated a reform on company culture to have customer-focus as the top priority rather than production-focus.

The quality initiative he has started resulted in Erdemir winning the National Quality Award. Taken together these initiatives brought the company to be among the most profitable companies in Türkiye.

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Excerpt from Melih Arat’s “Leaders of Change”

In 1997-1999, I served as the Chairman of Board of Erdemir, the largest Turkish steel company. Once again, the first action that was taken was to define the vision and mission of Erdemir explicitly. “What kind of a mission would best motivate us?” was one of the questions we asked. The company was engineering focused and investments were often gold-plated. Furthermore, as the only integrated flat steel company in Türkiye, the customer focus was lacking. The primary focus of the company was to make more and more investments in Ereğli.

Erdemir needed to cast aside this approach in order to be a regional player. Instead of being internally focused, it needed to adopt a broader vision. Instead of viewing the customer as a nuisance, it needed to apply total quality management techniques and put the customer at the focus of all the activities. Then, we reviewed the resources we had and identified the skills gaps that needed to be developed It became apparent that financial management needed significant improvements. We were unable to locate a qualified person to serve this function, so we brought a CFO in from the outside. Soon, we began to research other international companies and whether or not it was financially feasible to purchase them.

Until then, management had never toyed with such ideas as mergers and acquisitions. As Erdemir had a qualified engineering staff, we felt that we could improve the performance of other plants in the region. However, this required a significant cultural transformation at Erdemir. Did I single-handedly do this? No, I was only the catalyst. Erdemir had huge resources and was not making maximum use of those resources. My duty was to form an infrastructure by which those resources could be best utilized. It was also in my duty to bring in a professional to the post of the general manager. This way we were able to both initiate a quality initiative and a growth by acquisition strategy.