主题： Berkshire Hathaway

We can free managers up. I would say that we might very well free up at least 20 percent of the time of a CEO in the normal public … company—just in terms of meeting with analysts, and the calls, and dealing with banks, and all kinds of things that, essentially, we relieve them of so that they can spend all of their time figuring out the best way to run their business.

When a manager with a reputation for brilliance meets up with a business with a reputation for bad economics, it’s the reputation of the business that remains intact. [Jay-Z is] a real business man. I’m just pretending. We don’t hire because we get a tax break or because someone in the government tells us to. We hire when there’s more demand for what we are making or moving or selling. It’s that simple.

I have created something that I enjoy.… It’s a little crazy, it seems to me, if you are building a business and creating a business, not to create something you are going to enjoy when you get through. It’s like painting a painting. I mean, you ought to paint something you are going to enjoy looking at when you get through.

Whenever I read about some company undertaking a cost-cutting program, I know it’s not a company that really knows what costs are all about. Spurts don’t work in this area. The really good manager does not wake up in the morning and say, “This is the day I’m going to cut costs,” any more than he wakes up and decides to practice breathing.

I believe enormously in efficiency. I mean, it’s the only way living improves, is to get more output per unit of input. We’ve read management treatises that specify exactly how many people should report to any one executive, but they make little sense to us. When you have able managers of high character running businesses about which they are passionate, you can have a dozen or more reporting to you and still have time for an afternoon nap. Conversely, if you have even one person reporting to you who is deceitful, inept or uninterested, you will find yourself with more than you can handle. Charlie and I could work with double the number of managers we now have, so long as they had the rare qualities of the present ones.

You really have to be very careful in the messages you send as a CEO…. If you tell your managers you never want to disappoint Wall Street, and you want to report X per share, you may find that they start fudging figures to protect your predictions.

Usually the managers [we hire] came with the companies we bought, having demonstrated their talents throughout careers that spanned a wide variety of business circumstances. They were managerial stars long before they knew us, and our main contribution has been to not get in their way. This approach seems elementary: if my job were to manage a golf team—and if Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer were willing to play for me—neither would get a lot of directives from me about how to swing.

There are many giant company managers whom I greatly admire; Ken Chenault of American Express, Jeff Immelt of GE and Dick Kovacevich of Wells Fargo come quickly to mind. But I don’t think I could do the management job they do. And I know I wouldn’t enjoy many of the duties that come with their positions—meetings, speeches, foreign travel, the charity circuit, and governmental relations. For me, Ronald Reagan had it right: “It’s probably true that hard work never killed anyone—but why take the chance?”

We have a business with very few rules. The only rules the managers have is to basically think like owners. We want those people thinking exactly like they own those businesses themselves. Psychologically, we don’t even want them to think there is a Berkshire Hathaway.

We are not in the business of trying to change people. We don’t try and change people when we buy the entire business. We think it’s like marrying somebody to change them. It just doesn’t work very well. In 38 years, we’ve never had a single CEO of a subsidiary elect to leave Berkshire to work elsewhere. Counting Charlie, we now have six managers over 75, and I hope that in four years that number increases by at least two (Bob Shaw and I are both 72). Our rationale: It’s hard to teach a new dog old tricks.