As Kimberly Strassel notes in her May 17 Wall Street Journal column, when Bain invested in buying and upgrading the steel maker, its owner, Armco, was considering shutting it down.
In an article in the Wall Street Journal in April last year Chris Zook, a colleague of Mr Rigby's at Bain, drew a comparison between Amazon, a diversified Internet retailer, and American Express, a company that had stuck to its core business of providing financial services.