If anything, O'Neill attacked his job at Alcoa (and "attack" is a quintessential O'Neill word) with a streak of initiative that is highly uncharacteristic of old-line manufacturing industries like metal casting. He reorganized the company, getting rid of layers of management and practically emptying out the headquarters building in Pittsburgh. He set up 20 decentralized operating units, each focussed on its own markets. He reined over a Total Quality initiative. He went head-to-head with detractors in the environmental community.

Change Agent -- In fact, more than anything else, O'Neill demonstrated himself to be a professional "change agent." Not "change for change's sake," but change that comes from necessity. O'Neill has said that he views the world as a place that requires rapid, repeated change of people, at least if they are to have any hope of continuing to lead, or, for that matter, to survive.

Here's how O'Neill has explained the need to make changes: "It is my conviction that change should occur when things are going well, not when the pressure of failure forces action. Waiting until outside events force change is at best reactive administration and at worst management cowardice." And, if that's not reason enough, he has added a second: "My unwillingness to wait. My own observations and instincts tell me [when] we should be doing something different."

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that O'Neill quickly found himself on the front lines of Alcoa's marketing effort. His attitude? If we want to sell more aluminum, and do so at higher prices, we're going to have to get people to use it in more stuff. And if we want to get people to use it in more stuff, we're going to have to show them -- show them the aluminum, show them the stuff, show them the stuff with the aluminum in it, show them how much better it works -- the whole nine yards!

Get out there and sell! -- In his work at Alcoa, O'Neill seemed to take a page from the book of sophisticated marketers like DuPont -- people who say, "We can cook up something to solve just about any problem; the trick is to convince people the problem needs to be solved." Teflon is slippery, but nobody cares unless DuPont can corral the cookware makers into spending time and money stressing the benefits of slippery pots and pans to housewives who are tired of scrubbing dishes. Similarly, everyone knows that aluminum is light and strong; O'Neill recognized that it was his responsibility to demonstrate what those benefits look like in a specific part like an auto frame.

Ironically, when O'Neill came on board at Alcoa, he found a company whose strategy was to give up on aluminum and become another polymers company, just like DuPont. O'Neill had a different approach: Let's stick with aluminum and become a marketing company like DuPont!

Getting Into Shapes -- One consequence of O'Neill's marketing approach is that Alcoa started to do something a little crazy: they started to buy and build casting operations. And not just the kind of continuous casting operations that create semi-fabricated aluminum. They bought or built wheel casting plants and investment casting plants and fastener plants and auto space frame diecasting plants.

Didn't that create channel conflict? Shouldn't Alcoa be leaving casting to the casting specialists? The thing is, Alcoa tried that, offering a $1 billion bounty to any one of the Big Three automakers that would devote itself to an aluminum-intensive car. That grand gesture received little appreciation in Detroit. Calling the offer "chump change," Ward's Auto World observed that "a billion dollars is enough to design and build a vehicle, but the high cost of aluminum and the fabrication problems associated with it have kept U.S. automakers from taking the deal. Those U.S. automakers all have research programs working on aluminum car bodies."

Conclusion: If you want something done, do it yourself.

Hi-Tech Aluminum Castings-- Alcoa spent $170 million in Europe helping Audi AG develop its A8 sedan, mainly through a greenfield investment in a diecasting operation to make aluminum space frames in Soest, Germany. This gave O'Neill the opportunity to step up to the plate and enjoy making a product out of the raw material he sold. "It's relatively easy to make an aluminum die casting," he said. "The die castings we have had to learn how to make are different in order to capture the absolute crashworthiness of those components. The typical die casting of today is going to have an elongation of four percent; the die castings we're going to be supplying to Audi for this automobile will have an elongation ranging anywhere from 16 to 20 percent." O'Neill continued: "The reason we've had to learn how to do that is to supply to [the automakers] a component that is extraordinarily tough and able to handle and manage these crash-energy loads without shattering and coming apart. They've got to hang together, fold like an accordion and perform their function."

Perhaps Alcoa's marketing-driven attraction to casting and fabrication was compounded by the limitation the company faces in the technology for producing aluminum itself. There has been virtually no change in the process Alcoa created a hundred years ago for manufacturing aluminum -- the Hall-Heroult electrolytic process -- and none is on the horizon, either. That puts a very hard constraint on Alcoa's ability to deliver on what it recognizes is a real need: lower (and more stable) costs that will allow aluminum to more easily compete with other materials, like steel . . .

No Corporate Welfare. . . which leads naturally to the problem Alcoa faced with tight margins on semi-fabricated aluminum, and how Paul O'Neill dealt with it. No discussion of Paul O'Neill would be complete without mentioning the "Great Can Sheet Price Hike." In 1994, O'Neill explained to major users like Coca-Cola and Pepsi that prices for can stock were unreasonably low and that he was raising prices immediately -- by 50 - 100%! Needless to say, those customers were extremely unhappy. And since aluminum sheet for beverage cans represented 29% of Alcoa's business, it took guts for Paul O'Neill to take that step. But his outlook was simple: "The can sheet business was a disaster," he said. "It wasn't a business, it was a charity. We were getting a metal price that was half of the replacement cost." Other aluminum suppliers, likewise suffering from losses on can sheet, quickly followed Alcoa's lead and raised prices.

What does all of this lead us to expect now that Paul O'Neill is working in Washington? O'Neill won't necessarily fulfill his duties at Treasury by being a great marketer, or a clever technologist, or a tough negotiator, but he can be expected to zero in on the key need -- whatever it is -- and attack it, probably in an unusually direct way. Moreover, we can make a few specific predictions:

• No free lunches for American industry. O'Neill has said, "The companies that will survive and prosper in the future are those that can respond most effectively to international competition."

• No free lunches for anybody else. Of the Clinton administration bailout of Russia, he said, "Currency stabilization for whose benefit? I really don’t understand why someone would take billions of dollars and give it to people who willfully created their own economic mess."

• No job-saving deals. "[Today] is different from earlier times when improvement and ability to compete led to more jobs. It's leading to fewer jobs."

• No fast-and-loose markets. O'Neill is a devotee of stable prices and stable markets, with a minimum of peaks and valleys, in order to give producers the confidence they need to carry out operations.

• Production discipline. In 1993, O'Neill responded to the prospect of Russian aluminum dumping by orchestrating production cuts in other producing countries, rather than seeking protection under anti-dumping laws.

All in all, it is likely we can expect individual responsibility . . . productivity as top priority . . . a willingness -- no, a desire -- to compete . . . common sense . . . .

Gee -- come to think of it, maybe Paul O'Neill is "one of our own!"