His current steel hero is Francis Mer, former chairman of Arcelor SA, with Tom Usher, former top executive at U.S. Steel Corp., coming in a close second. And after more than a decade heading what's now known as the World Steel Association, Ian Christmas has a large and ever-expanding pool of candidates to choose from.

Traveling around the globe from WorldSteel's headquarters in Brussels, Christmas has met and is on first-name terms with industry executives from Pittsburgh and Charlotte, N.C., to London, Luxembourg, Tokyo and, in more recent years, Beijing, where WorldSteel opened an office in 2006 in a move Christmas describes as "very important" for a variety of reasons.

"Over the past 10 years, Chinese growth has had a dominant impact on our industry," he said. "Now, with the financial downturn, one of the locomotives of the world, which is China, has slowed down. And we have a problem.

"The big issue is China has too much steelmaking capacity for its needs," Christmas said. "But there is an even more fundamental issue,...