主题： Berkshire Hathaway

The CEO job self-selects for “can-do” types. If Wall Street analysts or board members urge that brand of CEO to consider possible acquisitions, it’s a bit like telling your ripening teenager to be sure to have a normal sex life. My successor will need one other particular strength: the ability to fight off the AB Cs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. When these corporate cancers metastasize, even the strongest of companies can falter.

Consultants and CEOs seeking board candidates will often say, “We’re looking for a woman,” or “a Hispanic,” or “someone from abroad,” or what have you. It sometimes sounds as if the mission is to stock Noah’s ark. Over the years I’ve been queried many times about potential directors and have yet to hear anyone ask, “Does he think like an intelligent owner?”

It’s difficult to overpay the truly extraordinary CEO of a giant enterprise. But this species is rare. Too often, executive compensation in the United States is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won’t change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO’s pay. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse CEO—aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet, and Bingo—all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.

Regardless of price, we have no interest at all in selling any good businesses that Berkshire owns. We are also very reluctant to sell subpar businesses as long as we expect them to generate at least some cash and as long as we feel good about their managers and labor relations.… Gin rummy managerial behavior (discard your least promising business at each turn) is not our style. We would rather have our overall results penalized a bit than engage in that kind of behavior.

Unlike [leveraged buyout] operators and private equity firms, we have no “exit” strategy—we buy to keep. That’s one reason why Berkshire is usually the first—and sometimes the only—choice for sellers and their managers. For somebody that cares about a business that they and their parents and maybe their grandparents lovingly built over decades—if they care about where that business ends up being after, for one reason or another, they don’t want to keep it or can’t keep it in the family, we absolutely are the first call.

When people come to me with wonderful businesses, and they do, and they talk about selling them to me, my first advice is, don’t sell them. I mean, wonderful businesses, they’re too rare. And if you’ve got one in your family, keep it unless something forces you to sell it.

If I had a church and I was the preacher, and half the congregation left every Sunday, I wouldn’t say, “Oh, this is marvelous, because I have all this liquidity among all my members! There’s terrific turnover!” I would rather get a church where all the seats were filled every Sunday by the same people. Well that’s the same way we look at the businesses we buy. We want to buy something that we’re really happy to own virtually forever.

At Berkshire, wanting our fees to be meaningless to our directors, we pay them only a pittance. Additionally, not wanting to insulate our directors from any corporate disaster we might have, we don’t provide them with officers’ and directors’ liability insurance (an unorthodoxy that, not so incidentally, has saved our shareholders many millions of dollars over the years). Basically, we want the behavior of our directors to be driven by the effect their decisions will have on their family’s net worth, not by their compensation.

You will always have institutions too big to fail, and sometimes they will fail in the next 100 years. But you will have fewer failures if the person on top and the board of directors who select that person and who set the terms of his or her employment if they have a lot to lose.

Nobody knows in business whether you’re batting .320 or not so everybody says they’re a .320 hitter. And the board of directors has to say, well, we’ve got a .320 hitter, because they couldn’t be responsible for picking a guy that bats .250.