Hans Vestberg: 'I want to listen, understand and help', Message from Verizon CEO post George Floyd murder - 2020

It's a sad situation we see in the nation right now. And I've been talking to my leadership team all this weekend, and I understand the situation. I mean, it's hard to understand what's happening. And I rarely [inaudible 00:00:18] with words, but I have it today. And I decided I'm going to read what I think.

It's hard to get the words right. These events unfolding across the country, they're rooted in hate, and contradictory with our beliefs as a company, and leave me with a feeling of regret and sadness. Verizon is fiercely committed to diversity, inclusion across all spectrums because it makes us and the world a better place, why it's so difficult for me to understand. I'm hopeful that the rest of the country will come to an understanding that valuing everyone equally is the best way forward. These events have really struck a chord for me and our entire leadership team.

I know that many of you are deeply saddened and outraged by the events which have unfolded as well. I want our Black employees to know that they matter and they are valued. Although I don't share the same life experience, I want to listen, understand and help. And I know that my leadership want to do it as well.

I'm an ally, and my thoughts are with all of the families who have been profoundly impacted by these events. It's important that we all come together as a team at this unprecedented and uncertain time and above all support one another.

I want to add that the [inaudible 00:02:41] team is in many parts of our business, especially the Verizon media news teams covering these events, put themselves at risk to ensure the accuracy of the stories that they are reporting. We're taking steps to make sure [inaudible 00:02:57] are safe, which is so important to me and the leadership team. As you know, we have four stakeholders that we balance our efforts between. For our employees we're ensuring a safe place to share, discuss, and gain the support they need during this particularly difficult time.

For our society, I have directed our foundation to contribute 10 million US dollars to racial justice charities. The charities are The National Urban League, NAACP, National Action Network, Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and National Coalition of Black Civic Participation. And we will expand even more of our community-based effort to help and ensure we're making a difference where it matters, our small part to help move the world forward. We have the responsibility as a large corporation to do right in these times, we cannot commit to a brand purpose of moving the world forward unless we're committed to helping ensure we move forward for everyone. We stand United as Verizon. Before we transition throughout to other subjects, I would like us to take a quiet moment to pay respect to those who have lost their lives to racial injustice. And so each and every one of us can reflect on how we as individuals and [inaudible 00:05:01] team find the strength to stand up against racist.

Steve Jobs: 'To me, markaeting is about values', Launch of Apple 'Think Dofferently' campaign - 1997

1997, California, USA

To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world; it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us. Now, Apple fortunately is one of the half-a-dozen best brands in the whole world. Right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, Sony, it is one of the greats of the greats. Not just in this country but all around the globe. And – but even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality.

And the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years. And we need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about the speeds and fees, it’s not to talk about MIPS and megahertz, it’s not to talk about why we’re better than Windows.

The dairy industry tried for twenty years to convince you that milk was good for you. It's a lie but they tried anyway. And the sales were going like this. And then they tried Got Milk and the sales are going like this. Got Milk doesn’t even talk about the product – as a matter of fact it focuses on the absence of the product. But the best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember, Nike sells the commodity. They sell shoes. And yet when you think of Nike you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product, they don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they're better than Reebok’s air soles.

What is Nike doing in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics.

That’s who they are, that’s what they are about.

Apple spends a fortune on advertising. You'd never know it. You'd never know it. So when I got here, Apple just fired their agency we're doing a competition with twenty-three agencies that you know four years from now we would pick one and we blew that up and we hired Chiat-Day – the ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago. We created some award-winning work including the commercial voted the best ad ever made – "1984," by advertising professionals. And we started working about eight weeks ago and the question we asked was: Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for? Where do we fit in this world? And what we are about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple’s about something more than that."

Apple at the core – its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.

That’s what we believe. And we had the opportunity to work with people like that. We have the opportunity to work with people like you, with software developers, with customers who have done it in some big and some small ways. And we believe that in this world people can change it for the better. And that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do."

And so what we’re going to do in our first brand marketing campaign in several years is to get back to that core value. A lot of things have changed. The market is a totally different place than it was a decade ago and Apple is totally different. Apple’s place in it is totally different. And believe me, the products and the distribution strategy and the manufacturing are totally different and we understand that. But values and core values, those things shouldn’t change. The things that Apple believed in at its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today. And so we wanted to find a way to communicate this and what we have is something that I am very moved by it – it honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living and some of them are not, but the ones that aren’t, as you’ll see, we know that if they’d ever used a computer it would have been a Mac.

And the theme of the campaign is “Think Different”. It’s the people honoring the people who think different and who moves this world forward. And it is what we are about. It touches the soul of this company. So I’m going ahead and roll it and I hope that you feel the same way about it that I do.

Here’s to the crazy ones – the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Charlie Munger: 'A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business', USC Business School - 1995

1994, USC Business School, California, USA

I'm going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom. That enables me to start talking about worldly wisdom—a much broader topic that interests me because I think all too little of it is delivered by modern educational systems, at least in an effective way.

And therefore, the talk is sort of along the lines that some behaviorist psychologists call Grandma's rule after the wisdom of Grandma when she said that you have to eat the carrots before you get the dessert.

The carrot part of this talk is about the general subject of worldly wisdom which is a pretty good way to start. After all, the theory of modern education is that you need a general education before you specialize. And I think to some extent, before you're going to be a great stock picker, you need some general education.

So, emphasizing what I sometimes waggishly call remedial worldly wisdom, I'm going to start by waltzing you through a few basic notions.

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.

You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you've got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you're using, the nature of human psychology is such that you'll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you'll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.

It's like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that's the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that's a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you've got to have multiple models.

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That's why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don't have enough models in their heads. So you've got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn't that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.

So let's briefly review what kind of models and techniques constitute this basic knowledge that everybody has to have before they proceed to being really good at a narrow art like stock picking.

First there's mathematics. Obviously, you've got to be able to handle numbers and quantities—basic arithmetic. And the great useful model, after compound interest, is the elementary math of permutations and combinations. And that was taught in my day in the sophomore year in high school. I suppose by now in great private schools, it's probably down to the eighth grade or so.

It's very simple algebra. It was all worked out in the course of about one year between Pascal and Fermat. They worked it out casually in a series of letters.

It's not that hard to learn. What is hard is to get so you use it routinely almost everyday of your life. The Fermat/Pascal system is dramatically consonant with the way that the world works. And it's fundamental truth. So you simply have to have the technique.

Many educational institutions—although not nearly enough—have realized this. At Harvard Business School, the great quantitative thing that bonds the first-year class together is what they call decision tree theory. All they do is take high school algebra and apply it to real life problems. And the students love it. They're amazed to find that high school algebra works in life….

By and large, as it works out, people can't naturally and automatically do this. If you understand elementary psychology, the reason they can't is really quite simple: The basic neural network of the brain is there through broad genetic and cultural evolution. And it's not Fermat/Pascal. It uses a very crude, shortcut-type of approximation. It's got elements of Fermat/Pascal in it. However, it's not good.

So you have to learn in a very usable way this very elementary math and use it routinely in life—just the way if you want to become a golfer, you can't use the natural swing that broad evolution gave you. You have to learn—to have a certain grip and swing in a different way to realize your full potential as a golfer.

If you don't get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a onelegged man in an asskicking contest. You're giving a huge advantage to everybody else.

One of the advantages of a fellow like Buffett, whom I've worked with all these years, is that he automatically thinks in terms of decision trees and the elementary math of permutations and combinations….

Obviously, you have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double-entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention.

And it's not that hard to understand.

But you have to know enough about it to understand its limitations—because although accounting is the starting place, it's only a crude approximation. And it's not very hard to understand its limitations. For example, everyone can see that you have to more or less just guess at the useful life of a jet airplane or anything like that. Just because you express the depreciation rate in neat numbers doesn't make it anything you really know.

In terms of the limitations of accounting, one of my favorite stories involves a very great businessman named Carl Braun who created the CF Braun Engineering Company. It designed and built oil refineries—which is very hard to do. And Braun would get them to come in on time and not blow up and have efficiencies and so forth. This is a major art.

And Braun, being the thorough Teutonic type that he was, had a number of quirks. And one of them was that he took a look at standard accounting and the way it was applied to building oil refineries and he said, “This is asinine.”

So he threw all of his accountants out and he took his engineers and said, “Now, we'll devise our own system of accounting to handle this process.” And in due time, accounting adopted a lot of Carl Braun's notions. So he was a formidably willful and talented man who demonstrated both the importance of accounting and the importance of knowing its limitations.

He had another rule, from psychology, which, if you're interested in wisdom, ought to be part of your repertoire—like the elementary mathematics of permutations and combinations.

His rule for all the Braun Company's communications was called the five W's—you had to tell who was going to do what, where, when and why. And if you wrote a letter or directive in the Braun Company telling somebody to do something, and you didn't tell him why, you could get fired. In fact, you would get fired if you did it twice.

You might ask why that is so important? Well, again that's a rule of psychology. Just as you think better if you array knowledge on a bunch of models that are basically answers to the question, why, why, why, if you always tell people why, they'll understand it better, they'll consider it more important, and they'll be more likely to comply. Even if they don't understand your reason, they'll be more likely to comply.

So there's an iron rule that just as you want to start getting worldly wisdom by asking why, why, why, in communicating with other people about everything, you want to include why, why, why. Even if it's obvious, it's wise to stick in the why.

Which models are the most reliable? Well, obviously, the models that come from hard science and engineering are the most reliable models on this Earth. And engineering quality control—at least the guts of it that matters to you and me and people who are not professional engineers—is very much based on the elementary mathematics of Fermat and Pascal:

It costs so much and you get so much less likelihood of it breaking if you spend this much. It's all elementary high school mathematics. And an elaboration of that is what Deming brought to Japan for all of that quality control stuff.

I don't think it's necessary for most people to be terribly facile in statistics. For example, I'm not sure that I can even pronounce the Poisson distribution. But I know what a Gaussian or normal distribution looks like and I know that events and huge aspects of reality end up distributed that way. So I can do a rough calculation.

But if you ask me to work out something involving a Gaussian distribution to ten decimal points, I can't sit down and do the math. I'm like a poker player who's learned to play pretty well without mastering Pascal.

And by the way, that works well enough. But you have to understand that bellshaped curve at least roughly as well as I do.

And, of course, the engineering idea of a backup system is a very powerful idea. The engineering idea of breakpoints—that's a very powerful model, too. The notion of a critical mass—that comes out of physics—is a very powerful model.

All of these things have great utility in looking at ordinary reality. And all of this cost-benefit analysis—hell, that's all elementary high school algebra, too. It's just been dolled up a little bit with fancy lingo.

I suppose the next most reliable models are from biology/ physiology because, after all, all of us are programmed by our genetic makeup to be much the same.

And then when you get into psychology, of course, it gets very much more complicated. But it's an ungodly important subject if you're going to have any worldly wisdom.

And you can demonstrate that point quite simply: There's not a person in this room viewing the work of a very ordinary professional magician who doesn't see a lot of things happening that aren't happening and not see a lot of things happening that are happening.

And the reason why is that the perceptual apparatus of man has shortcuts in it. The brain cannot have unlimited circuitry. So someone who knows how to take advantage of those shortcuts and cause the brain to miscalculate in certain ways can cause you to see things that aren't there.

Now you get into the cognitive function as distinguished from the perceptual function. And there, you are equally—more than equally in fact—likely to be misled. Again, your brain has a shortage of circuitry and so forth—and it's taking all kinds of little automatic shortcuts.

So when circumstances combine in certain ways—or more commonly, your fellow man starts acting like the magician and manipulates you on purpose by causing your cognitive dysfunction—you're a patsy.

And so just as a man working with a tool has to know its limitations, a man working with his cognitive apparatus has to know its limitations. And this knowledge, by the way, can be used to control and motivate other people….

So the most useful and practical part of psychology—which I personally think can be taught to any intelligent person in a week—is ungodly important. And nobody taught it to me by the way. I had to learn it later in life, one piece at a time. And it was fairly laborious. It's so elementary though that, when it was all over, I felt like a fool.

And yeah, I'd been educated at Cal Tech and the Harvard Law School and so forth. So very eminent places miseducated people like you and me.

The elementary part of psychology—the psychology of misjudgment, as I call it—is a terribly important thing to learn. There are about 20 little principles. And they interact, so it gets slightly complicated. But the guts of it is unbelievably important.

Terribly smart people make totally bonkers mistakes by failing to pay heed to it. In fact, I've done it several times during the last two or three years in a very important way. You never get totally over making silly mistakes.

There's another saying that comes from Pascal which I've always considered one of the really accurate observations in the history of thought. Pascal said in essence, “The mind of man at one and the same time is both the glory and the shame of the universe.”

And that's exactly right. It has this enormous power. However, it also has these standard misfunctions that often cause it to reach wrong conclusions. It also makes man extraordinarily subject to manipulation by others. For example, roughly half of the army of Adolf Hitler was composed of believing Catholics. Given enough clever psychological manipulation, what human beings will do is quite interesting.

Personally, I've gotten so that I now use a kind of two-track analysis. First, what are the factors that really govern the interests involved, rationally considered? And second, what are the subconscious influences where the brain at a subconscious level is automatically doing these things—which by and large are useful, but which often misfunction.

One approach is rationality—the way you'd work out a bridge problem: by evaluating the real interests, the real probabilities and so forth. And the other is to evaluate the psychological factors that cause subconscious conclusions—many of which are wrong.

Now we come to another somewhat less reliable form of human wisdom—microeconomics. And here, I find it quite useful to think of a free market economy—or partly free market economy—as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem….

This is a very unfashionable way of thinking because early in the days after Darwin came along, people like the robber barons assumed that the doctrine of the survival of the fittest authenticated them as deserving power—you know, “I'm the richest. Therefore, I'm the best. God's in his heaven, etc.”

And that reaction of the robber barons was so irritating to people that it made it unfashionable to think of an economy as an ecosystem. But the truth is that it is a lot like an ecosystem. And you get many of the same results.

Just as in an ecosystem, people who narrowly specialize can get terribly good at occupying some little niche. Just as animals flourish in niches, similarly, people who specialize in the business world—and get very good because they specialize—frequently find good economics that they wouldn't get any other way.

And once we get into microeconomics, we get into the concept of advantages of scale. Now we're getting closer to investment analysis—because in terms of which businesses succeed and which businesses fail, advantages of scale are ungodly important.

For example, one great advantage of scale taught in all of the business schools of the world is cost reductions along the so-called experience curve. Just doing something complicated in more and more volume enables human beings, who are trying to improve and are motivated by the incentives of capitalism, to do it more and more efficiently.

The very nature of things is that if you get a whole lot of volume through your joint, you get better at processing that volume. That's an enormous advantage. And it has a lot to do with which businesses succeed and fail….

Let's go through a list—albeit an incomplete one—of possible advantages of scale. Some come from simple geometry. If you're building a great spherical tank, obviously as you build it bigger, the amount of steel you use in the surface goes up with the square and the cubic volume goes up with the cube. So as you increase the dimensions, you can hold a lot more volume per unit area of steel.

And there are all kinds of things like that where the simple geometry—the simple reality—gives you an advantage of scale.

For example, you can get advantages of scale from TV advertising. When TV advertising first arrived—when talking color pictures first came into our living rooms—it was an unbelievably powerful thing. And in the early days, we had three networks that had whatever it was—say 90% of the audience.

Well, if you were Procter & Gamble, you could afford to use this new method of advertising. You could afford the very expensive cost of network television because you were selling so many cans and bottles. Some little guy couldn't. And there was no way of buying it in part. Therefore, he couldn't use it. In effect, if you didn't have a big volume, you couldn't use network TV advertising which was the most effective technique.

So when TV came in, the branded companies that were already big got a huge tail wind. Indeed, they prospered and prospered and prospered until some of them got fat and foolish, which happens with prosperity—at least to some people….

And your advantage of scale can be an informational advantage. If I go to some remote place, I may see Wrigley chewing gum alongside Glotz's chewing gum. Well, I know that Wrigley is a satisfactory product, whereas I don't know anything about Glotz's. So if one is 40 cents and the other is 30 cents, am I going to take something I don't know and put it in my mouth—which is a pretty personal place, after all—for a lousy dime?

So, in effect, Wrigley , simply by being so well known, has advantages of scale—what you might call an informational advantage.

Another advantage of scale comes from psychology. The psychologists use the term social proof. We are all influenced—subconsciously and to some extent consciously—by what we see others do and approve. Therefore, if everybody's buying something, we think it's better. We don't like to be the one guy who's out of step.

Again, some of this is at a subconscious level and some of it isn't. Sometimes, we consciously and rationally think, “Gee, I don't know much about this. They know more than I do. Therefore, why shouldn't I follow them?”

The social proof phenomenon which comes right out of psychology gives huge advantages to scale—for example, with very wide distribution, which of course is hard to get. One advantage of Coca-Cola is that it's available almost everywhere in the world.

Well, suppose you have a little soft drink. Exactly how do you make it available all over the Earth? The worldwide distribution setup—which is slowly won by a big enterprise—gets to be a huge advantage…. And if you think about it, once you get enough advantages of that type, it can become very hard for anybody to dislodge you.

There's another kind of advantage to scale. In some businesses, the very nature of things is to sort of cascade toward the overwhelming dominance of one firm.

The most obvious one is daily newspapers. There's practically no city left in the U.S., aside from a few very big ones, where there's more than one daily newspaper.

And again, that's a scale thing. Once I get most of the circulation, I get most of the advertising. And once I get most of the advertising and circulation, why would anyone want the thinner paper with less information in it? So it tends to cascade to a winnertakeall situation. And that's a separate form of the advantages of scale phenomenon.

Similarly, all these huge advantages of scale allow greater specialization within the firm. Therefore, each person can be better at what he does.

And these advantages of scale are so great, for example, that when Jack Welch came into General Electric, he just said, “To hell with it. We're either going to be # 1 or #2 in every field we're in or we're going to be out. I don't care how many people I have to fire and what I have to sell. We're going to be #1 or #2 or out.”

That was a very toughminded thing to do, but I think it was a very correct decision if you're thinking about maximizing shareholder wealth. And I don't think it's a bad thing to do for a civilization either, because I think that General Electric is stronger for having Jack Welch there.

And there are also disadvantages of scale. For example, we—by which I mean Berkshire Hathaway—are the largest shareholder in Capital Cities/ABC. And we had trade publications there that got murdered where our competitors beat us. And the way they beat us was by going to a narrower specialization.

We'd have a travel magazine for business travel. So somebody would create one which was addressed solely at corporate travel departments. Like an ecosystem, you're getting a narrower and narrower specialization.

Well, they got much more efficient. They could tell more to the guys who ran corporate travel departments. Plus, they didn't have to waste the ink and paper mailing out stuff that corporate travel departments weren't interested in reading. It was a more efficient system. And they beat our brains out as we relied on our broader magazine.

That's what happened to The Saturday Evening Post and all those things. They're gone. What we have now is Motocross—which is read by a bunch of nuts who like to participate in tournaments where they turn somersaults on their motorcycles. But they care about it. For them, it's the principal purpose of life. A magazine called Motocross is a total necessity to those people. And its profit margins would make you salivate.

Just think of how narrowcast that kind of publishing is. So occasionally, scaling down and intensifying gives you the big advantage. Bigger is not always better.

The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting—so that the big people don't always win—is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy. And with the bureaucracy comes the territoriality—which is again grounded in human nature.

And the incentives are perverse. For example, if you worked for AT&T in my day, it was a great bureaucracy. Who in the hell was really thinking about the shareholder or anything else? And in a bureaucracy, you think the work is done when it goes out of your in-basket into somebody else's in-basket. But, of course, it isn't. It's not done until AT&T delivers what it's supposed to deliver. So you get big, fat, dumb, unmotivated bureaucracies.

They also tend to become somewhat corrupt. In other words, if I've got a department and you've got a department and we kind of share power running this thing, there's sort of an unwritten rule: “If you won't bother me, I won't bother you and we're both happy.” So you get layers of management and associated costs that nobody needs. Then, while people are justifying all these layers, it takes forever to get anything done. They're too slow to make decisions and nimbler people run circles around them.

The constant curse of scale is that it leads to big, dumb bureaucracy—which, of course, reaches its highest and worst form in government where the incentives are really awful. That doesn't mean we don't need governments—because we do. But it's a terrible problem to get big bureaucracies to behave.

So people go to stratagems. They create little decentralized units and fancy motivation and training programs. For example, for a big company, General Electric has fought bureaucracy with amazing skill. But that's because they have a combination of a genius and a fanatic running it. And they put him in young enough so he gets a long run. Of course, that's Jack Welch.

But bureaucracy is terrible…. And as things get very powerful and very big, you can get some really dysfunctional behavior. Look at Westinghouse. They blew billions of dollars on a bunch of dumb loans to real estate developers. They put some guy who'd come up by some career path—I don't know exactly what it was, but it could have been refrigerators or something—and all of a sudden, he's loaning money to real estate developers building hotels. It's a very unequal contest. And in due time, they lost all those billions of dollars.

CBS provides an interesting example of another rule of psychology—namely, Pavlovian association. If people tell you what you really don't want to hear what's unpleasant—there's an almost automatic reaction of antipathy. You have to train yourself out of it. It isn't foredestined that you have to be this way. But you will tend to be this way if you don't think about it.

Television was dominated by one network—CBS in its early days. And Paley was a god. But he didn't like to hear what he didn't like to hear. And people soon learned that. So they told Paley only what he liked to hear. Therefore, he was soon living in a little cocoon of unreality and everything else was corrupt—although it was a great business.

So the idiocy that crept into the system was carried along by this huge tide. It was a Mad Hatter's tea party the last ten years under Bill Paley.

And that is not the only example by any means. You can get severe misfunction in the high ranks of business. And of course, if you're investing, it can make a lot of difference. If you take all the acquisitions that CBS made under Paley, after the acquisition of the network itself, with all his advisors—his investment bankers, management consultants and so forth who were getting paid very handsomely—it was absolutely terrible.

For example, he gave something like 20% of CBS to the Dumont Company for a television set manufacturer which was destined to go broke. I think it lasted all of two or three years or something like that. So very soon after he'd issued all of that stock, Dumont was history. You get a lot of dysfunction in a big fat, powerful place where no one will bring unwelcome reality to the boss.

So life is an everlasting battle between those two forces—to get these advantages of scale on one side and a tendency to get a lot like the U.S. Agriculture Department on the other side—where they just sit around and so forth. I don't know exactly what they do. However, I do know that they do very little useful work.

On the subject of advantages of economies of scale, I find chain stores quite interesting. Just think about it. The concept of a chain store was a fascinating invention. You get this huge purchasing power—which means that you have lower merchandise costs. You get a whole bunch of little laboratories out there in which you can conduct experiments. And you get specialization.

If one little guy is trying to buy across 27 different merchandise categories influenced by traveling salesmen, he's going to make a lot of poor decisions. But if your buying is done in headquarters for a huge bunch of stores, you can get very bright people that know a lot about refrigerators and so forth to do the buying.

The reverse is demonstrated by the little store where one guy is doing all the buying. It's like the old story about the little store with salt all over its walls. And a stranger comes in and says to the storeowner, “You must sell a lot of salt.” And he replies, “No, I don't. But you should see the guy who sells me salt.”

So there are huge purchasing advantages. And then there are the slick systems of forcing everyone to do what works. So a chain store can be a fantastic enterprise.

It's quite interesting to think about Wal-Mart starting from a single store in Bentonville, Arkansas against Sears, Roebuck with its name, reputation and all of its billions. How does a guy in Bentonville, Arkansas with no money blow right by Sears, Roebuck? And he does it in his own lifetime—in fact, during his own late lifetime because he was already pretty old by the time he started out with one little store….

He played the chain store game harder and better than anyone else. Walton invented practically nothing. But he copied everything anybody else ever did that was smart—and he did it with more fanaticism and better employee manipulation. So he just blew right by them all.

He also had a very interesting competitive strategy in the early days. He was like a prizefighter who wanted a great record so he could be in the finals and make a big TV hit. So what did he do? He went out and fought 42 palookas. Right? And the result was knockout, knockout, knockout—42 times.

Walton, being as shrewd as he was, basically broke other small town merchants in the early days. With his more efficient system, he might not have been able to tackle some titan head-on at the time. But with his better system, he could destroy those small town merchants. And he went around doing it time after time after time. Then, as he got bigger, he started destroying the big boys.

Well, that was a very, very shrewd strategy.

You can say, “Is this a nice way to behave?” Well, capitalism is a pretty brutal place. But I personally think that the world is better for having Wal-Mart. I mean you can idealize small town life. But I've spent a fair amount of time in small towns. And let me tell you you shouldn't get too idealistic about all those businesses he destroyed.

Plus, a lot of people who work at Wal-Mart are very high grade, bouncy people who are raising nice children. I have no feeling that an inferior culture destroyed a superior culture. I think that is nothing more than nostalgia and delusion. But, at any rate, it's an interesting model of how the scale of things and fanaticism combine to be very powerful.

And it's also an interesting model on the other side—how with all its great advantages, the disadvantages of bureaucracy did such terrible damage to Sears, Roebuck. Sears had layers and layers of people it didn't need. It was very bureaucratic. It was slow to think. And there was an established way of thinking. If you poked your head up with a new thought, the system kind of turned against you. It was everything in the way of a dysfunctional big bureaucracy that you would expect.

In all fairness, there was also much that was good about it. But it just wasn't as lean and mean and shrewd and effective as Sam Walton. And, in due time, all its advantages of scale were not enough to prevent Sears from losing heavily to Wal-Mart and other similar retailers.

Here's a model that we've had trouble with. Maybe you'll be able to figure it out better. Many markets get down to two or three big competitors—or five or six. And in some of those markets, nobody makes any money to speak of. But in others, everybody does very well.

Over the years, we've tried to figure out why the competition in some markets gets sort of rational from the investor's point of view so that the shareholders do well, and in other markets, there's destructive competition that destroys shareholder wealth.

If it's a pure commodity like airline seats, you can understand why no one makes any money. As we sit here, just think of what airlines have given to the world—safe travel, greater experience, time with your loved ones, you name it. Yet, the net amount of money that's been made by the shareholders of airlines since Kitty Hawk, is now a negative figure—a substantial negative figure. Competition was so intense that, once it was unleashed by deregulation, it ravaged shareholder wealth in the airline business.

Yet, in other fields—like cereals, for example—almost all the big boys make out. If you're some kind of a medium grade cereal maker, you might make 15% on your capital. And if you're really good, you might make 40%. But why are cereals so profitable—despite the fact that it looks to me like they're competing like crazy with promotions, coupons and everything else? I don't fully understand it.

Obviously, there's a brand identity factor in cereals that doesn't exist in airlines. That must be the main factor that accounts for it.

And maybe the cereal makers by and large have learned to be less crazy about fighting for market share—because if you get even one person who's hell-bent on gaining market share…. For example, if I were Kellogg and I decided that I had to have 60% of the market, I think I could take most of the profit out of cereals. I'd ruin Kellogg in the process. But I think I could do it.

In some businesses, the participants behave like a demented Kellogg. In other businesses, they don't. Unfortunately, I do not have a perfect model for predicting how that's going to happen.

For example, if you look around at bottler markets, you'll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many others where they destroy most of the profitability of the two franchises. That must get down to the peculiarities of individual adjustment to market capitalism. I think you'd have to know the people involved to fully understand what was happening.

In microeconomics, of course, you've got the concept of patents, trademarks, exclusive franchises and so forth. Patents are quite interesting. When I was young, I think more money went into patents than came out. Judges tended to throw them out—based on arguments about what was really invented and what relied on prior art. That isn't altogether clear.

But they changed that. They didn't change the laws. They just changed the administration—so that it all goes to one patent court. And that court is now very much more pro-patent. So I think people are now starting to make a lot of money out of owning patents.

Trademarks, of course, have always made people a lot of money. A trademark system is a wonderful thing for a big operation if it's well known.

The exclusive franchise can also be wonderful. If there were only three television channels awarded in a big city and you owned one of them, there were only so many hours a day that you could be on. So you had a natural position in an oligopoly in the pre-cable days.

And if you get the franchise for the only food stand in an airport, you have a captive clientele and you have a small monopoly of a sort.

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. And most people do not get this straight in their heads. But a fellow like Buffett does.

For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles—which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, “They've invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones.”

And Warren said, “Gee, I hope this doesn't work because if it does, I'm going to close the mill.” And he meant it.

What was he thinking? He was thinking, “It's a lousy business. We're earning substandard returns and keeping it open just to be nice to the elderly workers. But we're not going to put huge amounts of new capital into a lousy business.”

And he knew that the huge productivity increases that would come from a better machine introduced into the production of a commodity product would all go to the benefit of the buyers of the textiles. Nothing was going to stick to our ribs as owners.

That's such an obvious concept—that there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.

Conversely, if you own the only newspaper in Oshkosh and they were to invent more efficient ways of composing the whole newspaper, then when you got rid of the old technology and got new fancy computers and so forth, all of the savings would come right through to the bottom line.

In all cases, the people who sell the machinery—and, by and large, even the internal bureaucrats urging you to buy the equipment—show you projections with the amount you'll save at current prices with the new technology. However, they don't do the second step of the analysis which is to determine how much is going stay home and how much is just going to flow through to the customer. I've never seen a single projection incorporating that second step in my life. And I see them all the time. Rather, they always read: “This capital outlay will save you so much money that it will pay for itself in three years.”

So you keep buying things that will pay for themselves in three years. And after 20 years of doing it, somehow you've earned a return of only about 4% per annum. That's the textile business.

And it isn't that the machines weren't better. It's just that the savings didn't go to you. The cost reductions came through all right. But the benefit of the cost reductions didn't go to the guy who bought the equipment. It's such a simple idea. It's so basic. And yet it's so often forgotten.

Then there's another model from microeconomics which I find very interesting. When technology moves as fast as it does in a civilization like ours, you get a phenomenon which I call competitive destruction. You know, you have the finest buggy whip factory and all of a sudden in comes this little horseless carriage. And before too many years go by, your buggy whip business is dead. You either get into a different business or you're dead—you're destroyed. It happens again and again and again.

And when these new businesses come in, there are huge advantages for the early birds. And when you're an early bird, there's a model that I call “surfing”—when a surfer gets up and catches the wave and just stays there, he can go a long, long time. But if he gets off the wave, he becomes mired in shallows….

But people get long runs when they're right on the edge of the wave—whether it's Microsoft or Intel or all kinds of people, including National Cash Register in the early days.

The cash register was one of the great contributions to civilization. It's a wonderful story. Patterson was a small retail merchant who didn't make any money. One day, somebody sold him a crude cash register which he put into his retail operation. And it instantly changed from losing money to earning a profit because it made it so much harder for the employees to steal….

But Patterson, having the kind of mind that he did, didn't think, “Oh, good for my retail business.” He thought, “I'm going into the cash register business.” And, of course, he created National Cash Register.

And he “surfed”. He got the best distribution system, the biggest collection of patents and the best of everything. He was a fanatic about everything important as the technology developed. I have in my files an early National Cash Register Company report in which Patterson described his methods and objectives. And a well-educated orangutan could see that buying into partnership with Patterson in those early days, given his notions about the cash register business, was a total 100% cinch.

And, of course, that's exactly what an investor should be looking for. In a long life, you can expect to profit heavily from at least a few of those opportunities if you develop the wisdom and will to seize them. At any rate, “surfing” is a very powerful model.

However, Berkshire Hathaway , by and large, does not invest in these people that are “surfing” on complicated technology. After all, we're cranky and idiosyncratic—as you may have noticed.

And Warren and I don't feel like we have any great advantage in the high-tech sector. In fact, we feel like we're at a big disadvantage in trying to understand the nature of technical developments in software, computer chips or what have you. So we tend to avoid that stuff, based on our personal inadequacies.

Again, that is a very, very powerful idea. Every person is going to have a circle of competence. And it's going to be very hard to advance that circle. If I had to make my living as a musician…. I can't even think of a level low enough to describe where I would be sorted out to if music were the measuring standard of the civilization.

So you have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don't, you're going to lose. And that's as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you've got an edge. And you've got to play within your own circle of competence.

If you want to be the best tennis player in the world, you may start out trying and soon find out that it's hopeless—that other people blow right by you. However, if you want to become the best plumbing contractor in Bemidji, that is probably doable by two-thirds of you. It takes a will. It takes the intelligence. But after a while, you'd gradually know all about the plumbing business in Bemidji and master the art. That is an attainable objective, given enough discipline. And people who could never win a chess tournament or stand in center court in a respectable tennis tournament can rise quite high in life by slowly developing a circle of competence—which results partly from what they were born with and partly from what they slowly develop through work.

So some edges can be acquired. And the game of life to some extent for most of us is trying to be something like a good plumbing contractor in Bemidji. Very few of us are chosen to win the world's chess tournaments.

Some of you may find opportunities “surfing” along in the new high-tech fields—the Intels, the Microsofts and so on. The fact that we don't think we're very good at it and have pretty well stayed out of it doesn't mean that it's irrational for you to do it.

Well, so much for the basic microeconomics models, a little bit of psychology, a little bit of mathematics, helping create what I call the general substructure of worldly wisdom. Now, if you want to go on from carrots to dessert, I'll turn to stock picking—trying to draw on this general worldly wisdom as we go.

I don't want to get into emerging markets, bond arbitrage and so forth. I'm talking about nothing but plain vanilla stock picking. That, believe me, is complicated enough. And I'm talking about common stock picking.

The first question is, “What is the nature of the stock market?” And that gets you directly to this efficient market theory that got to be the rage—a total rage—long after I graduated from law school.

And it's rather interesting because one of the greatest economists of the world is a substantial shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway and has been for a long time. His textbook always taught that the stock market was perfectly efficient and that nobody could beat it. But his own money went into Berkshire and made him wealthy. So, like Pascal in his famous wager, he hedged his bet.

Is the stock market so efficient that people can't beat it? Well, the efficient market theory is obviously roughly right—meaning that markets are quite efficient and it's quite hard for anybody to beat the market by significant margins as a stock picker by just being intelligent and working in a disciplined way.

Indeed, the average result has to be the average result. By definition, everybody can't beat the market. As I always say, the iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth. That's just the way it is. So the answer is that it's partly efficient and partly inefficient.

And, by the way, I have a name for people who went to the extreme efficient market theory—which is “bonkers”. It was an intellectually consistent theory that enabled them to do pretty mathematics. So I understand its seductiveness to people with large mathematical gifts. It just had a difficulty in that the fundamental assumption did not tie properly to reality.

Again, to the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If you're good at manipulating higher mathematics in a consistent way, why not make an assumption which enables you to use your tool?

The model I like—to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for common stocks—is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market.

Any damn fool can see that a horse carrying a light weight with a wonderful win rate and a good post position etc., etc. is way more likely to win than a horse with a terrible record and extra weight and so on and so on. But if you look at the odds, the bad horse pays 100 to 1, whereas the good horse pays 3 to 2. Then it's not clear which is statistically the best bet using the mathematics of Fermat and Pascal. The prices have changed in such a way that it's very hard to beat the system.

And then the track is taking 17% off the top. So not only do you have to outwit all the other betters, but you've got to outwit them by such a big margin that on average, you can afford to take 17% of your gross bets off the top and give it to the house before the rest of your money can be put to work.

Given those mathematics, is it possible to beat the horses only using one's intelligence? Intelligence should give some edge, because lots of people who don't know anything go out and bet lucky numbers and so forth. Therefore, somebody who really thinks about nothing but horse performance and is shrewd and mathematical could have a very considerable edge, in the absence of the frictional cost caused by the house take.

Unfortunately, what a shrewd horseplayer's edge does in most cases is to reduce his average loss over a season of betting from the 17% that he would lose if he got the average result to maybe 10%. However, there are actually a few people who can beat the game after paying the full 17%.

I used to play poker when I was young with a guy who made a substantial living doing nothing but bet harness races…. Now, harness racing is a relatively inefficient market. You don't have the depth of intelligence betting on harness races that you do on regular races. What my poker pal would do was to think about harness races as his main profession. And he would bet only occasionally when he saw some mispriced bet available. And by doing that, after paying the full handle to the house—which I presume was around 17%—he made a substantial living.

You have to say that's rare. However, the market was not perfectly efficient. And if it weren't for that big 17% handle, lots of people would regularly be beating lots of other people at the horse races. It's efficient, yes. But it's not perfectly efficient. And with enough shrewdness and fanaticism, some people will get better results than others.

The stock market is the same way—except that the house handle is so much lower. If you take transaction costs—the spread between the bid and the ask plus the commissions—and if you don't trade too actively, you're talking about fairly low transaction costs. So that with enough fanaticism and enough discipline, some of the shrewd people are going to get way better results than average in the nature of things.

It is not a bit easy. And, of course, 50% will end up in the bottom half and 70% will end up in the bottom 70%. But some people will have an advantage. And in a fairly low transaction cost operation, they will get better than average results in stock picking.

How do you get to be one of those who is a winner—in a relative sense—instead of a loser?

Here again, look at the pari-mutuel system. I had dinner last night by absolute accident with the president of Santa Anita. He says that there are two or three betters who have a credit arrangement with them, now that they have off-track betting, who are actually beating the house. They're sending money out net after the full handle—a lot of it to Las Vegas, by the way—to people who are actually winning slightly, net, after paying the full handle. They're that shrewd about something with as much unpredictability as horse racing.

And the one thing that all those winning betters in the whole history of people who've beaten the pari-mutuel system have is quite simple. They bet very seldom.

It's not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. But it is given to human beings who work hard at it—who look and sift the world for a mispriced be—that they can occasionally find one.

And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don't. It's just that simple.

That is a very simple concept. And to me it's obviously right—based on experience not only from the pari-mutuel system, but everywhere else.

And yet, in investment management, practically nobody operates that way. We operate that way—I'm talking about Buffett and Munger. And we're not alone in the world. But a huge majority of people have some other crazy construct in their heads. And instead of waiting for a near cinch and loading up, they apparently ascribe to the theory that if they work a little harder or hire more business school students, they'll come to know everything about everything all the time.

To me, that's totally insane. The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights.

How many insights do you need? Well, I'd argue: that you don't need many in a lifetime. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its accumulated billions, the top ten insights account for most of it. And that's with a very brilliant man—Warren's a lot more able than I am and very disciplined—devoting his lifetime to it. I don't mean to say that he's only had ten insights. I'm just saying, that most of the money came from ten insights.

So you can get very remarkable investment results if you think more like a winning pari-mutuel player. Just think of it as a heavy odds against game full of craziness with an occasional mispriced something or other. And you're probably not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime. And when you get a few, you really load up. It's just that simple.

When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, “I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you'd punched through the card, you couldn't make any more investments at all.”

He says, “Under those rules, you'd really think carefully about what you did and you'd be forced to load up on what you'd really thought about. So you'd do so much better.”

Again, this is a concept that seems perfectly obvious to me. And to Warren it seems perfectly obvious. But this is one of the very few business classes in the U.S. where anybody will be saying so. It just isn't the conventional wisdom.

To me, it's obvious that the winner has to bet very selectively. It's been obvious to me since very early in life. I don't know why it's not obvious to very many other people.

I think the reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, “My God, they're purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?” And he said, “Mister, I don't sell to fish.”

Investment managers are in the position of that fishing tackle salesman. They're like the guy who was selling salt to the guy who already had too much salt. And as long as the guy will buy salt, why they'll sell salt. But that isn't what ordinarily works for the buyer of investment advice.

If you invested Berkshire Hathaway-style, it would be hard to get paid as an investment manager as well as they're currently paid—because you'd be holding a block of Wal-Mart and a block of Coca-Cola and a block of something else. You'd just sit there. And the client would be getting rich. And, after a while, the client would think, “Why am I paying this guy half a percent a year on my wonderful passive holdings?”

So what makes sense for the investor is different from what makes sense for the manager. And, as usual in human affairs, what determines the behavior are incentives for the decision maker.

From all business, my favorite case on incentives is Federal Express. The heart and soul of their system—which creates the integrity of the product—is having all their airplanes come to one place in the middle of the night and shift all the packages from plane to plane. If there are delays, the whole operation can't deliver a product full of integrity to Federal Express customers.

And it was always screwed up. They could never get it done on time. They tried everything—moral suasion, threats, you name it. And nothing worked.

Finally, somebody got the idea to pay all these people not so much an hour, but so much a shift—and when it's all done, they can all go home. Well, their problems cleared up overnight.

So getting the incentives right is a very, very important lesson. It was not obvious to Federal Express what the solution was. But maybe now, it will hereafter more often be obvious to you.

All right, we've now recognized that the market is efficient as a pari-mutuel system is efficient with the favorite more likely than the long shot to do well in racing, but not necessarily give any betting advantage to those that bet on the favorite.

In the stock market, some railroad that's beset by better competitors and tough unions may be available at one-third of its book value. In contrast, IBM in its heyday might be selling at 6 times book value. So it's just like the pari-mutuel system. Any damn fool could plainly see that IBM had better business prospects than the railroad. But once you put the price into the formula, it wasn't so clear anymore what was going to work best for a buyer choosing between the stocks. So it's a lot like a pari-mutuel system. And, therefore, it gets very hard to beat.

What style should the investor use as a picker of common stocks in order to try to beat the market—in other words, to get an above average long-term result? A standard technique that appeals to a lot of people is called “sector rotation”. You simply figure out when oils are going to outperform retailers, etc., etc., etc. You just kind of flit around being in the hot sector of the market making better choices than other people. And presumably, over a long period of time, you get ahead.

However, I know of no really rich sector rotator. Maybe some people can do it. I'm not saying they can't. All I know is that all the people I know who got rich—and I know a lot of them—did not do it that way.

The second basic approach is the one that Ben Graham used—much admired by Warren and me. As one factor, Graham had this concept of value to a private owner—what the whole enterprise would sell for if it were available. And that was calculable in many cases.

Then, if you could take the stock price and multiply it by the number of shares and get something that was one third or less of sellout value, he would say that you've got a lot of edge going for you. Even with an elderly alcoholic running a stodgy business, this significant excess of real value per share working for you means that all kinds of good things can happen to you. You had a huge margin of safety—as he put it—by having this big excess value going for you.

But he was, by and large, operating when the world was in shell shock from the 1930s—which was the worst contraction in the English-speaking world in about 600 years. Wheat in Liverpool, I believe, got down to something like a 600-year low, adjusted for inflation. People were so shell-shocked for a long time thereafter that Ben Graham could run his Geiger counter over this detritus from the collapse of the 1930s and find things selling below their working capital per share and so on.

And in those days, working capital actually belonged to the shareholders. If the employees were no longer useful, you just sacked them all, took the working capital and stuck it in the owners' pockets. That was the way capitalism then worked.

Nowadays, of course, the accounting is not realistic because the minute the business starts contracting, significant assets are not there. Under social norms and the new legal rules of the civilization, so much is owed to the employees that, the minute the enterprise goes into reverse, some of the assets on the balance sheet aren't there anymore.

Now, that might not be true if you run a little auto dealership yourself. You may be able to run it in such a way that there's no health plan and this and that so that if the business gets lousy, you can take your working capital and go home. But IBM can't, or at least didn't. Just look at what disappeared from its balance sheet when it decided that it had to change size both because the world had changed technologically and because its market position had deteriorated.

And in terms of blowing it, IBM is some example. Those were brilliant, disciplined people. But there was enough turmoil in technological change that IBM got bounced off the wave after “surfing” successfully for 60 years. And that was some collapse—an object lesson in the difficulties of technology and one of the reasons why Buffett and Munger don't like technology very much. We don't think we're any good at it, and strange things can happen.

At any rate, the trouble with what I call the classic Ben Graham concept is that gradually the world wised up and those real obvious bargains disappeared. You could run your Geiger counter over the rubble and it wouldn't click.

But such is the nature of people who have a hammer—to whom, as I mentioned, every problem looks like a nail that the Ben Graham followers responded by changing the calibration on their Geiger counters. In effect, they started defining a bargain in a different way. And they kept changing the definition so that they could keep doing what they'd always done. And it still worked pretty well. So the Ben Graham intellectual system was a very good one.

Of course, the best part of it all was his concept of “Mr. Market”. Instead of thinking the market was efficient, he treated it as a manic-depressive who comes by every day. And some days he says, “I'll sell you some of my interest for way less than you think it's worth.” And other days, “Mr. Market” comes by and says, “I'll buy your interest at a price that's way higher than you think it's worth.” And you get the option of deciding whether you want to buy more, sell part of what you already have or do nothing at all.

To Graham, it was a blessing to be in business with a manic-depressive who gave you this series of options all the time. That was a very significant mental construct. And it's been very useful to Buffett, for instance, over his whole adult lifetime.

However, if we'd stayed with classic Graham the way Ben Graham did it, we would never have had the record we have. And that's because Graham wasn't trying to do what we did.

For example, Graham didn't want to ever talk to management. And his reason was that, like the best sort of professor aiming his teaching at a mass audience, he was trying to invent a system that anybody could use. And he didn't feel that the man in the street could run around and talk to managements and learn things. He also had a concept that the management would often couch the information very shrewdly to mislead. Therefore, it was very difficult. And that is still true, of course—human nature being what it is.

And so having started out as Grahamites which, by the way, worked fine—we gradually got what I would call better insights. And we realized that some company that was selling at 2 or 3 times book value could still be a hell of a bargain because of momentums implicit in its position, sometimes combined with an unusual managerial skill plainly present in some individual or other, or some system or other.

And once we'd gotten over the hurdle of recognizing that a thing could be a bargain based on quantitative measures that would have horrified Graham, we started thinking about better businesses.

And, by the way, the bulk of the billions in Berkshire Hathaway have come from the better businesses. Much of the first $200 or $300 million came from scrambling around with our Geiger counter. But the great bulk of the money has come from the great businesses.

And even some of the early money was made by being temporarily present in great businesses. Buffett Partnership, for example, owned American Express and Disney when they got pounded down.

Most investment managers are in a game where the clients expect them to know a lot about a lot of things. We didn't have any clients who could fire us at Berkshire Hathaway. So we didn't have to be governed by any such construct. And we came to this notion of finding a mispriced bet and loading up when we were very confident that we were right. So we're way less diversified. And I think our system is miles better.

However, in all fairness, I don't think a lot of money managers could successfully sell their services if they used our system. But if you're investing for 40 years in some pension fund, what difference does it make if the path from start to finish is a little more bumpy or a little different than everybody else's so long as it's all going to work out well in the end? So what if there's a little extra volatility.

In investment management today, everybody wants not only to win, but to have a yearly outcome path that never diverges very much from a standard path except on the upside. Well, that is a very artificial, crazy construct. That's the equivalent in investment management to the custom of binding the feet of Chinese women. It's the equivalent of what Nietzsche meant when he criticized the man who had a lame leg and was proud of it.

That is really hobbling yourself. Now, investment managers would say, “We have to be that way. That's how we're measured.” And they may be right in terms of the way the business is now constructed. But from the viewpoint of a rational consumer, the whole system's “bonkers” and draws a lot of talented people into socially useless activity.

And the Berkshire system is not “bonkers”. It's so damned elementary that even bright people are going to have limited, really valuable insights in a very competitive world when they're fighting against other very bright, hardworking people.

And it makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times. You're much more likely to do well if you start out to do something feasible instead of something that isn't feasible. Isn't that perfectly obvious?

How many of you have 56 brilliant ideas in which you have equal confidence? Raise your hands, please. How many of you have two or three insights that you have some confidence in? I rest my case.

I'd say that Berkshire Hathaway's system is adapting to the nature of the investment problem as it really is.

We've really made the money out of high quality businesses. In some cases, we bought the whole business. And in some cases, we just bought a big block of stock. But when you analyze what happened, the big money's been made in the high quality businesses. And most of the other people who've made a lot of money have done so in high quality businesses.

Over the long term, it's hard for a stock to earn a much better return than the business which underlies it earns. If the business earns 6% on capital over 40 years and you hold it for that 40 years, you're not going to make much different than a 6% return—even if you originally buy it at a huge discount. Conversely, if a business earns 18% on capital over 20 or 30 years, even if you pay an expensive looking price, you'll end up with a fine result.

So the trick is getting into better businesses. And that involves all of these advantages of scale that you could consider momentum effects.

How do you get into these great companies? One method is what I'd call the method of finding them small get 'em when they're little. For example, buy Wal-Mart when Sam Walton first goes public and so forth. And a lot of people try to do just that. And it's a very beguiling idea. If I were a young man, I might actually go into it.

But it doesn't work for Berkshire Hathaway anymore because we've got too much money. We can't find anything that fits our size parameter that way. Besides, we're set in our ways. But I regard finding them small as a perfectly intelligent approach for somebody to try with discipline. It's just not something that I've done.

Finding 'em big obviously is very hard because of the competition. So far, Berkshire's managed to do it. But can we continue to do it? What's the next Coca-Cola investment for us? Well, the answer to that is I don't know. I think it gets harder for us all the time….

And ideally and we've done a lot of this—you get into a great business which also has a great manager because management matters. For example, it's made a great difference to General Electric that Jack Welch came in instead of the guy who took over Westinghouse—a very great difference. So management matters, too.

And some of it is predictable. I do not think it takes a genius to understand that Jack Welch was a more insightful person and a better manager than his peers in other companies. Nor do I think it took tremendous genius to understand that Disney had basic momentums in place which are very powerful and that Eisner and Wells were very unusual managers.

So you do get an occasional opportunity to get into a wonderful business that's being run by a wonderful manager. And, of course, that's hog heaven day. If you don't load up when you get those opportunities, it's a big mistake.

Occasionally, you'll find a human being who's so talented that he can do things that ordinary skilled mortals can't. I would argue that Simon Marks—who was second generation in Marks & Spencer of England—was such a man. Patterson was such a man at National Cash Register. And Sam Walton was such a man.

These people do come along—and in many cases, they're not all that hard to identify. If they've got a reasonable hand—with the fanaticism and intelligence and so on that these people generally bring to the party—then management can matter much.

However, averaged out, betting on the quality of a business is better than betting on the quality of management. In other words, if you have to choose one, bet on the business momentum, not the brilliance of the manager.

But, very rarely, you find a manager who's so good that you're wise to follow him into what looks like a mediocre business.

Another very simple effect I very seldom see discussed either by investment managers or anybody else is the effect of taxes. If you're going to buy something which compounds for 30 years at 15% per annum and you pay one 35% tax at the very end, the way that works out is that after taxes, you keep 13.3% per annum.

In contrast, if you bought the same investment, but had to pay taxes every year of 35% out of the 15% that you earned, then your return would be 15% minus 35% of 15%—or only 9.75% per year compounded. So the difference there is over 3.5%. And what 3.5% does to the numbers over long holding periods like 30 years is truly eye-opening. If you sit back for long, long stretches in great companies, you can get a huge edge from nothing but the way that income taxes work.

Even with a 10% per annum investment, paying a 35% tax at the end gives you 8.3% after taxes as an annual compounded result after 30 years. In contrast, if you pay the 35% each year instead of at the end, your annual result goes down to 6.5%. So you add nearly 2% of after-tax return per annum if you only achieve an average return by historical standards from common stock investments in companies with tiny dividend payout ratios.

But in terms of business mistakes that I've seen over a long lifetime, I would say that trying to minimize taxes too much is one of the great standard causes of really dumb mistakes. I see terrible mistakes from people being overly motivated by tax considerations.

Warren and I personally don't drill oil wells. We pay our taxes. And we've done pretty well, so far. Anytime somebody offers you a tax shelter from here on in life, my advice would be don't buy it.

In fact, any time anybody offers you anything with a big commission and a 200-page prospectus, don't buy it. Occasionally, you'll be wrong if you adopt “Munger's Rule”. However, over a lifetime, you'll be a long way ahead—and you will miss a lot of unhappy experiences that might otherwise reduce your love for your fellow man.

There are huge advantages for an individual to get into a position where you make a few great investments and just sit back and wait: You're paying less to brokers. You're listening to less nonsense. And if it works, the governmental tax system gives you an extra 1, 2 or 3 percentage points per annum compounded.

And you think that most of you are going to get that much advantage by hiring investment counselors and paying them 1% to run around, incurring a lot of taxes on your behalf'? Lots of luck.

Are there any dangers in this philosophy? Yes. Everything in life has dangers. Since it's so obvious that investing in great companies works, it gets horribly overdone from time to time. In the “Nifty-Fifty” days, everybody could tell which companies were the great ones. So they got up to 50, 60 and 70 times earnings. And just as IBM fell off the wave, other companies did, too. Thus, a large investment disaster resulted from too high prices. And you've got to be aware of that danger….

So there are risks. Nothing is automatic and easy. But if you can find some fairly-priced great company and buy it and sit, that tends to work out very, very well indeed—especially for an individual,

Within the growth stock model, there's a sub-position: There are actually businesses, that you will find a few times in a lifetime, where any manager could raise the return enormously just by raising prices—and yet they haven't done it. So they have huge untapped pricing power that they're not using. That is the ultimate no-brainer.

That existed in Disney. It's such a unique experience to take your grandchild to Disneyland. You're not doing it that often. And there are lots of people in the country. And Disney found that it could raise those prices a lot and the attendance stayed right up.

So a lot of the great record of Eisner and Wells was utter brilliance but the rest came from just raising prices at Disneyland and Disneyworld and through video cassette sales of classic animated movies.

At Berkshire Hathaway, Warren and I raised the prices of See's Candy a little faster than others might have. And, of course, we invested in Coca-Cola—which had some untapped pricing power. And it also had brilliant management. So a Goizueta and Keough could do much more than raise prices. It was perfect.

You will get a few opportunities to profit from finding underpricing. There are actually people out there who don't price everything as high as the market will easily stand. And once you figure that out, it's like finding in the street—if you have the courage of your convictions.

If you look at Berkshire's investments where a lot of the money's been made and you look for the models, you can see that we twice bought into twonewspaper towns which have since become onenewspaper towns. So we made a bet to some extent….

In one of those—The Washington Post—we bought it at about 20% of the value to a private owner. So we bought it on a Ben Grahamstyle basis—at onefifth of obvious value—and, in addition, we faced a situation where you had both the top hand in a game that was clearly going to end up with one winner and a management with a lot of integrity and intelligence. That one was a real dream. They're very high class people—the Katharine Graham family. That's why it was a dream—an absolute, damn dream.

Of course, that came about back in '73-74. And that was almost like 1932. That was probably a once-in-40-yearstype denouement in the markets. That investment's up about 50 times over our cost.

If I were you, I wouldn't count on getting any investment in your lifetime quite as good as The Washington Post was in '73 and '74.

But it doesn't have to be that good to take care of you.

Let me mention another model. Of course, Gillette and Coke make fairly lowpriced items and have a tremendous marketing advantage all over the world. And in Gillette's case, they keep surfing along new technology which is fairly simple by the standards of microchips. But it's hard for competitors to do.

So they've been able to stay constantly near the edge of improvements in shaving. There are whole countries where Gillette has more than 90% of the shaving market.

GEICO is a very interesting model. It's another one of the 100 or so models you ought to have in your head. I've had many friends in the sick business fixup game over a long lifetime. And they practically all use the following formula—I call it the cancer surgery formula:

They look at this mess. And they figure out if there's anything sound left that can live on its own if they cut away everything else. And if they find anything sound, they just cut away everything else. Of course, if that doesn't work, they liquidate the business. But it frequently does work.

And GEICO had a perfectly magnificent business submerged in a mess, but still working. Misled by success, GEICO had done some foolish things. They got to thinking that, because they were making a lot of money, they knew everything. And they suffered huge losses.

All they had to do was to cut out all the folly and go back to the perfectly wonderful business that was lying there. And when you think about it, that's a very simple model. And it's repeated over and over again.

And, in GEICO's case, think about all the money we passively made…. It was a wonderful business combined with a bunch of foolishness that could easily be cut out. And people were coming in who were temperamentally and intellectually designed so they were going to cut it out. That is a model you want to look for.

And you may find one or two or three in a long lifetime that are very good. And you may find 20 or 30 that are good enough to be quite useful.

Finally, I'd like to once again talk about investment management. That is a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work.

Of course, that isn't true of plumbing and it isn't true of medicine. If you're going to make your careers in the investment management business, you face a very peculiar situation. And most investment managers handle it with psychological denial just like a chiropractor. That is the standard method of handling the limitations of the investment management process. But if you want to live the best sort of life, I would urge each of you not to use the psychological denial mode.

I think a select few—a small percentage of the investment managers—can deliver value added. But I don't think brilliance alone is enough to do it. I think that you have to have a little of this discipline of calling your shots and loading up—you want to maximize your chances of becoming one who provides above average real returns for clients over the long pull.

But I'm just talking about investment managers engaged in common stock picking. I am agnostic elsewhere. I think there may well be people who are so shrewd about currencies and this, that and the other thing that they can achieve good longterm records operating on a pretty big scale in that way. But that doesn't happen to be my milieu. I'm talking about stock picking in American stocks.

I think it's hard to provide a lot of value added to the investment management client, but it's not impossible.

Warren Buffett: 'Go to work for whomever you admire the most' Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia - 2001

18 July 2001, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA

Testing. 1 million. 2 million. Great, okay. I came in from Nebraska today, and you're probably all familiar with us, mainly by our football team. We have those fellows with the big white helmets with those red 'N's on them. I asked one of our starters the other day, "What's the 'N' stand for?" And he said, "Knowledge." We make it tough on them though. I mean you don't coast through Nebraska just because you're a football player. They major in agricultural economics, and there's a two question final for all of the players. And the first question is, "What did old MacDonald have?" And they were giving that to one of our potential Heisman Trophy winners the other day. He started to sweat. Finally he brightened up, he said, "Farm!" The professor, delighted of course, you don't want to flunk a Heisman candidate. So he said, "Now," he said. "You're halfway home. Just one more question. How do you spell 'farm'?" Now the guy really starts to sweat, and he looks at the ceiling and he looks around. Finally his face brightens up and he says, "Ee-i-ee-i-oh!" So watch for that guy this year, he'll be dynamite.

I really want to talk about what's on your mind, so we're going to do a Q and A in a minute. There are a couple questions I always get asked. You know, people always say, "Well who should I go to work for when I get out then?" I've got a very simple answer, we may elaborate more on this as we go along, but, you know the real thing to do is to get going for some institution or individual that you admire. I mean it's crazy to take in-between jobs just because they look good on your resume, or because you get a little higher starting pay.

I was up at Harvard a while back, and a very nice young guy, he picked me up at the airport, a Harvard Business School attendee. And he said, "Look. I went to undergrad here, and then I worked for X and Y and Z, and now I've come here." And he said, "I thought it would really round out my resume perfectly if I went to work now for a big management consulting firm." And I said, "Well, is that what you want to do?" And he said, "No," but he said, "That's the perfect resume." And I said, "Well when are you going to start doing what you like?" And he said, "Well I'll get to that someday." And I said, "Well you know, your plan sounds to me a lot like saving up sex for your old age. It just doesn't make a lot of sense."

I told that same group, I said, "Go to work for whomever you admire the most." I said, "You can't get a bad result. You'll jump out of bed in the morning and you'll be having fun." The Dean called me up a couple weeks later. He said, "What did you tell those kids? They're all becoming self-employed." So, you've got to temper that advice a little bit. Play one game a little bit with me for just a minute and then we'll get to your questions.

I'd like for the moment to have you pretend I've made you a great offer, and I've told you that you could pick any one of your classmates- and you now know each other probably pretty well after being here for a while. You have 24 hours to think it over and you can pick any one of your classmates, and you get 10 percent of their earnings for the rest of their lives. And I ask you, what goes through your mind in determining which one of those you would pick? You can't pick the one with the richest father, that doesn't count. I mean, you've got to do this on merit. But, you probably wouldn't pick the person that gets the highest grades in the class.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with getting the highest grades in the class, but that isn't going to be the quality that sets apart a big winner from the rest of the pack. Think about who you would pick and why. And I think you'll find when you get through, you'll pick some individual- you've all got the ability, you wouldn't be here otherwise. And you've all got the energy. I mean, the initiative is here, the intelligence is here throughout the class. But some of you are going to be bigger winners than others.

And it gets down to a bunch of qualities that, interestingly enough, are self-made. I mean it's not how tall you are. It's not whether you can kick a football 60 yards. It's not whether you can run the 100 yard dash in 10 seconds. It's not whether you're the best looking person in the room. It's a whole bunch of qualities that really come out of Ben Franklin, or the Boy Scout coders, or whatever it may be. I mean, it's integrity, it's honesty, it's generosity, it's being willing to do more than your share, it's just all those qualities that are self-selected.

And then if you look on the other side of the ledger, because there's always a catch to these free gifts and genie jokes, so. You also have to -and this is the fun part- you also have to sell short one of your classmates and pay 10 percent of what they do. So, who do you think is going to do the worst in the class? This is a way more. And think about it again. And again, it isn't the person with the lowest grades or anything of the sort. It's the person who just doesn't shape up in the character department.

We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don't have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you're going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb. I mean, you don't want a spark of energy out of them. So it's that third quality. But everything about that quality is your choice.

You know, you can't change the way you were wired much, but you can change a lot of what you do with that wiring. And it's the habits that you generate now on those qualities, or those negatives qualities. I mean the person who always claims credit for things they didn't do, that always cuts corners, that you can't count on. In the end those are habit patterns, and the time to form the right habits is when you're your age. I mean it doesn't do me much good to get golf lessons now. If I'd gotten golf lessons when I was your age I might be a decent golfer.

But, someone once said "the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken." And I see that all the time. I see people with habit patterns that are self-destructive when they're 50 or 60 and they really can't change then, they're imprisoned by them. But you're not imprisoned by anything, so. When you write down the qualities of that person that you'd like to buy 10 percent of, look at that list and ask yourself, is there anything on that list I couldn't do?

And the answer is there won't be. And when you look at the person you sell short, and you look at those qualities that you don't like, if you see any of those in yourself -egotism, whatever it may be, selfishness- you can get rid of that. That is not ordained. And if you follow that, and Ben Franklin did this and my old boss Ben Graham did this at early ages in their young teens, Ben Graham looked around and he said, "Who do I admire?" And he wanted to be admired himself and he said, "Why do I admire these other people?" And he said, "If I admire them for these reasons, maybe other people would admire me if I behave in a similar manner." And he decided what kind of a person he wanted to be.

And if you follow that, at the end you'll be the person you want to buy 10 percent of. I mean that's the goal in the end, and it's something that's achievable by everybody in this room. So that's the end of the sermon. Now let's talk about what's on your mind, and you can ask anything. The only thing I won't tell you is what we're buying or selling. I don't even tell myself that. I mean I write it down and then it's like the Coca-Cola formula. There's only two people that can get into the trust department and find out what they are, and I don't know who the two are, so. We don't talk about what we're buying or selling, but anything else is fair game. Personal, business, anything you'd like to talk about. And actually, the tougher the questions are, the more interesting it is for me. So don't spare my feelings, I mean just throw it at my head.

And with that, I guess we've got a microphone- is this the only microphone or is there one on this side?

Speaker: It's the only microphone right here. To ask a question you'll need to come down to this microphone.

Warren Buffett: Just stand in line, and I'll be Regis Philbin and you can- I have an old-fashioned belief that I can only should expect to make money in things that I understand. And when I say 'understand,' I don't mean understand what the product does or anything like that. I mean understand what the economics of the business are likely to look like 10 years from now or 20 years from now. I know in general what the economics of, say Wrigley chewing gum will look like 10 years from now. The internet isn't going to change the way people chew gum. It isn't going to change which gum they chew. If you own the chewing gum market in a big way, and you've got Doublemint, and Spearmint, and Juicy Fruit, those brands will be there 10 years from now. So I can pinpoint exactly what the numbers are going to look like on Wrigley, but I'm not going to be way off if I try to look forward on something like that.

Evaluating that company is within what I call 'my circle of competence.' I understand what they do, I understand the economics of it, I understand the competitive aspects of the business. There can be all kinds of companies that have wonderful futures but I don't know which ones they are. I've given talks in the past where I carry with me a 70-page tightly-printed list, and it shows 2000 auto companies. Now if at the start of the 20 th century you had seen what the auto was going to do to this country, the impact it would have on the lives of then your children and grandchildren and so on. It just, it transformed the American landscape. But of those 2000 companies, three basically survive. And they haven't done that well, many times.

So how do you pick three winners out of 2000? I mean it's not so easy to do. It's easy when you look back, but it's not so easy looking forward. So you could have been dead right on the fact that the auto industry- in fact, you probably couldn't have predicted how big of an impact it would have. But you wouldn't have- if you'd bought companies across the board you wouldn't have made any money, because the economic characteristics of that business were not easy to define.

I've always said the easier thing to do is figure out who loses. And what you really should have done in 1905 or so, when you saw what was going to happen with the auto is you should have gone short horses. There were 20 million horses in 1900 and there's about 4 million horses now. So it's easy to figure out the losers, you know the loser is the horse. But the winner was the auto overall. But 2000 companies just about failed, a few merged out and so on.

There were three auto companies in the Dow Industrials in the 1920s and 30s: Studebaker, Nash-Kelvinator, and Hudson Motor. Now those names are all familiar to me, and maybe some of them are familiar to you, but they're not making any cars. They didn't make money. And yet at one time they were in the Dow 30, they were the aristocrats of American business. And they got creamed. So, figuring out the economic characteristics of the winners in a wonderful business is not easy.

In North Carolina, you know Orville and Wilbur took off- or I guess Orville took off and Wilbur watched. I'd have been Wilbur. But, if you could have seen the future of the airline business from that point forward and how that would transform things, it would have blown you away. And it's excited people incidentally ever since. But if there had been a capitalist in Kitty Hawk, he should have shot Orville down, because it's done nothing but cost investors money. There were over 400 airplane companies in the 1920s and 30s alone. There was in Omaha, there was in Nebraska, we were the Silicon Valley of apparently of aircraft, and they all disappeared. It's been a terrible business.

At the end of 1991 if you'd added up the aggregate earnings from all airline companies, with billions poured in since Wilbur and Orville were down there, they came to less than zero. The number of passengers went up every year. The importance of the industry was dramatically increased decade by decade, and nobody made any money. So, figuring out the economic consequences- T.V. I think there's, I don't know, 20-25 million sets a year sold in the United States. I don't think there's one of them made in the United States anymore. You'd say, T.V. set manufacturer, what a wonderful business. Nobody had a T.V. in 1950, thereabouts, '45-'50. Everybody has multiple sets now. Nobody in the United States has made any real money making the sets; they're all out of business. You know the Magnavoxs, the RCAs, all of those companies.

Radio was the equivalent in the 20s. Over 500 companies making radios in the 1920s. Again, I don't think there's a U.S. radio manufacturer at the present time. But Coca-Cola, you know. What was it, 1884 at Jacobs Pharmacy or whatever, a fellow comes up with something. A lot of copiers over the years, but now you've got a company that's selling roughly 1.1 billion 8 ounce servings of its product, not all Coke -Sprite and some others- daily throughout the world 117 years later.

So understanding the economic characteristics of a business is different than predicting the fact that an industry is going to do wonderfully. So when I look at the internet businesses or I look at tech businesses, I say this is a marvelous thing and I love to play around on the computer, and I order my books from Amazon and all kinds of things. But I don't know who's going to win. Unless I know who's going to win, I'm not interested in investing; I'll just play around on the computer.

Defining your circle of competence is the most important aspect of investing. It's not how large your circle is, you don't have to be an expert on everything, but knowing where the perimeter of that circle of what you know and what you don't know is, and staying inside of it is all important. Tom Watson Senior who started IBM said in his book, he said, "I'm no genius. But I'm smart in spots, and I stay around those spots." And, you know that is the key. So if I understand a few things and stick in that arena, I'll do okay. And if I don't understand something but I get all excited about it because my neighbors are talking about, the stocks are going up, everything; I start fooling around someplace else, eventually I'll get creamed. And I should. So now let's go over here.

Audience: Hello, Mr. Buffett. I've got two short questions. One, is how do you find intrinsic value in a company?

Warren Buffett: Well intrinsic value is the number that if you were all-knowing about the future and could predict all the cash that a business would give you between now and judgement day, discounted at the proper discount rate that number is what the intrinsic value of a business is. In other words, the only reason for making an investment and laying out money now is to get more money later on, right? That's what investing is all about.

Now, when you look at a bond, so when you see a United States government bond it's very easy to tell what you're going to get back. It says it right on the bond. It says when you get the interest payments. It says when you get the principal. So, it's very easy to figure out the value of a bond. It can change tomorrow if interest rates change, but the cash flows are printed on the bond. The cash flows aren't printed on a stock certificate. That's the job of the analyst is to print out, change that stock certificate which represents an interest in the business, and change that into a bond and say this is what I think it's going to pay out in the future. When we buy some new machine for Shaw to make carpet, that's what we're thinking about obviously, and you'll learn that in business school.

But it's the same thing for a big business. If you buy Coca-Cola today, the company is selling for about $110-15 billion in the market. The question is, if you had 110 or 15 billion- you wouldn't be listening to me, but I'd be listening to you incidentally. But the question is would you lay it out today to get what the Coca-Cola Company is going to deliver to you over the next 2 or 300 years? The discount rate doesn't make much difference as you get further out. And that is a question of how much cash they're going to give you. It isn't a question of how many analysts are going to recommend it, or what the volume of the stock is, or what the chart looks like or anything, it's a question of how much cash it's going to give you.

It's true whether if you're buying a farm, it's true if you're buying an apartment house, any financial asset. Oil in the ground, you're laying out cash now to get more cash back later on. And the question is is how much are you going to get, when are you going get it, and how sure are you? And when I calculate intrinsic value of a business when we buy businesses, and whether we're buying all of a business or a little piece of a business, I always think we're buying the whole business because that's my approach to it. I look at it and I say, what will come out of this business and when?

And, what you'd really like of course is then to be able to use the money that you earned, and earn higher returns on it as you go along. I mean, Berkshire has never distributed anything to its shareholders, but its ability to distribute goes up as the value of the businesses we own increases. We can compound it internally, but the real question is, Berkshire's selling for, we'll say 105 or so billion now. What can we distribute from that- if you're going to buy the whole company for 105 billion now, can we distribute enough cash to you soon enough to make it sensible at present interest rates to lay out that cash now.

And that's what it gets down to. And if you can't answer that question, you can't buy the stock. You can gamble in the stock if you want to, or your neighbors can buy it. But if you don't answer that question, and I can't answer that for internet companies for example, and a lot of companies, there are all kinds of companies I can't answer it for. But I just stay away from those. Number two.

Audience: So you've got formulas involved in finding intrinsic values on certain companies? I mean, you got a mathematical system?

Warren Buffett: Just kind of present value, future cash, yeah.

Audience: Second short question is why haven't you written down your set of formulas or your strategies in written form so you can share it with everyone else?

Warren Buffett: Well I think I actually have written about that. If you read the annual reports over the recent years, in fact the most recent annual report I used what I've just been talking about, I used the illustration of Aesop. Because here Aesop was in 600 BC- smart man, wasn't smart enough to know it was 600 BC though. Would have taken a little foresight. But Aesop, in between tortoises and hares, and all these other things he found time to write about birds. And he said, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Now that isn't quite complete because the question is, how sure are you that there are two in the bush, and how long do you have to wait to get them out? Now, he probably knew that but he just didn't have time because he had all these other parables to write and had to get on with it. But he was halfway there in 600 BC. That's all there is to investing is, how many birds are in the bush, when are you going to get them out, and how sure are you?

Now if interest rates are 15 percent, roughly, you've got to get two birds out of the bush in five years to equal the bird in the hand. But if interest rates are 3 percent, and you can get two birds out in 20 years, it still makes sense to give up the bird in the hand, because it all gets back to discounting against an interest rate. The problem is often you don't know not only how many birds are in the bush, but in the case of the internet companies there weren't any birds in the bush. But they still take the bird that you give them if they're in the hand.

But I actually have written about this sort of thing, and stealing heavily from Aesop who wrote it some 2600 years ago, but I've been behind on my reading. Yeah?

Audience: Good morning. I know you're famed for your success, but I was curious if there were any particular moments in your life, or mistakes or failures that you've made that were particularly memorable, what you may have learned from them, and if you had any particular advice for the students here in dealing with discouraging circumstances.

Warren Buffett: Yeah. Well I've made a lot of mistakes. The biggest mistake- well not necessarily the biggest, but buying Berkshire Hathaway itself was a mistake, because Berkshire was a lousy textile business. And I bought it very cheap. I'd been taught by Ben Graham to buy things on a quantitative basis, look around for things that are cheap. And I was taught that say in 1940 or 1950; it made a big impression on me.

So I went around looking for what I call used cigar butts of stocks. And the cigar butt approach to buying stocks is that you walk down the street and you're looking around for cigar butts, and you find on the street this terrible-looking, soggy, ugly-looking cigar- one puff left in it. But you pick it up and you get your one puff. Disgusting, you throw it away, but it's free. I mean it's cheap. And then you look around for another soggy one-puff cigarette.

Well that's what I did for years. It's a mistake. Although, you can make money doing it, but you can't make it with big money, it's so much easier just to buy wonderful businesses. So now I'd rather buy a wonderful business at a fair price than a fair business at a wonderful price. But in those days I was buying cheap stocks, and Berkshire was selling below its working capital per share. You got the plants for nothing, you got the machinery for nothing, you got the inventory and receivables at a discount. It was cheap, so I bought it. And 20 years later I was still running a lousy business and that money did not compound.

You really want to be in a wonderful business because the time is the friend of the wonderful business. You keep compounding, it keeps doing more business, and you keep making more money. Time is the enemy of the lousy business. I could have sold Berkshire, perhaps liquidated it and made a quick little profit, you know one puff. But staying with those kind of businesses is a big mistake.

So you might say I learned something out of that mistake. And I would have been way better off taking- what I did with Berkshire is I kept buying better businesses. I started an insurance business, See's Candy, the Buffalo- all kinds of things. I would have been way better doing that with a brand new little entity that I'd set up rather than using Berkshire as the platform. Now I've had a lot of fun out of it. I mean everything in life seems to turn out for the better, so I don't have any complaints about that, but it was a dumb thing to do.

I went into US Air; I bought a preferred stock in 1989. As soon as my check cleared, the company went into the red and never got out. I mean it was really dumb. I've got an 800 number I call now whenever I think about buying an airline stock. I call them up any hour, fortunately I can call them at three in the morning, and I just dial and I say, "My name's Warren and I'm an aero-holic. And I'm thinking about buying this thing." Then they talk me down. It takes hours sometimes but it's worth it, believe me. If you ever think about buying an airline stock, call me and I'll give you the 800 number because you don't want to do it.

But, we got lucky in terms of how we eventually came out on it. But it was a dumb, dumb decision- all mine. And I've done- biggest in terms of opportunity costs, eventual costs, I bought half interest on a Sinclair filling station when I was about 20 with a guy who I was in the National Guard with. And I had about $10,000 then and I put $2,000 in, and I lost it all. So, that was 20%, and that means that the opportunity cost is now $6 billion of that filling station which is a big price to pay for getting to wipe a few windows and a few windshields and things like that. So, actually I like it when Berkshire goes down because it reduces the cost of that mistake on an opportunity cost.

But, the biggest mistakes we've made by far- I've made, not we've made. The biggest mistakes I've made by far are mistakes of omission and not commission. I mean it's the things I knew enough to do, they were within my circle of competence, and I was sucking my thumb. And that is really, those are the ones that hurt. They don't show up any place. I probably cost

Berkshire at least $5 billion, for example, by sucking my thumb 20 years ago, or close to it when Fannie Mae was having some troubles. We could have bought the whole company for practically nothing.

And I don't worry about that if it's Microsoft because I don't know. Microsoft isn't in my circle of competence. So I don't have any reason to think I'm entitled to make money out of Microsoft or out of cocoa beans or whatever. But I did know enough to understand Fannie Mae and I blew it. And that never shows up under conventional accounting. But I know the cost of it. I passed it up. And those are the big, big mistakes, and I've got plenty of them. And unless I tell you about them in the annual report -and I resist the temptation sometimes- unless I tell you about them in the annual report you're not going to know it because it doesn't show up under conventional accounting.

But omission is way bigger than commission. Big opportunities in life have to be seized. We don't do very many things, but when we get the chance to do something that's right and big, we've got to do it. And even to do it in a small scale is just as big a mistake almost as not doing it at all. You've really got to grab them when they come, because you're not going to get 500 great opportunities. You would be off if when you got out of school here you got a punch card with 20 punches on it, and every financial decision you made you used up a punch. You'd get very rich because you'd think through very hard each one.

I mean I went to a cocktail party and somebody talked about a company he didn't even understand what they did or couldn't pronounce the name. But they'd made some money last week and another one like it. You wouldn't buy it if you only had 20 punches on that card. There's a temptation to dabble, particularly during bull markets, and stocks are so easy. It's easier now than ever because you can do it online. You know just you click it in and maybe it goes up a point and you get excited about that and you buy another one the next day and so on. You can't much money over time doing that. But if you had a punch card with only 20 punches, you weren't going to get another one for the rest of your life, you would think a long time before every investment decision. And you would make good ones and you'd make big ones, and you probably wouldn't even use all 20 punches in your lifetime. But you wouldn't need to. Yep?

Audience: Mr. Buffett, good morning. In your comments about making mistakes and errors like that, could you talk a little bit about your sell discipline? When you're in a position and you feel like it's no longer good. What criteria do you use when you just finally abandon it?

Warren Buffett: Yeah when I started out- the sell situation has changed over the years because when I started out I had way more ideas than money. I mean I would go through Moody's Manual, I went through it page by page, and then I went through it again page by page. And I found stocks in there that I could understand that were selling at like two times earnings, even one times earnings. Well, when you only have 10,000 bucks that can get a little frustrating, and if you don't like to borrow money, which I never liked to borrow money.

So, I was always coming up with more ideas than I had money, so I had to sell whatever I liked least to buy something new that just was compelling to me. And for a long time I was in that mode. And now our problem is we have more money than ideas. So, if you look at our annual report which is on the internet at our homepage berkshirehathaway.com. You'll see something in the back called the economic principles of Berkshire, which I believe in setting out for my partners. They are my partners; I don't look at them as shareholders I look at them as partners. They're going to be my partners for life. So I want to tell them how I think. And if they disagree with the way I think that's fine, but I don't want them to be disappointed in me.

So I lay out there and I say, in terms of our wholly-owned businesses, we're not going to sell no matter how much anybody offers us for them. I mean if somebody offers us three times what something is worth- See's Candy, The Buffalo News, Borsheims, whatever it may be, we're not going to sell it. I may be wrong in having that approach. I know I'm not wrong if I owned 100 percent of Berkshire because that's the way I want to live my life. I've got all the money I could possibly need, it just amounts to a change in the newspaper story on my obituary and the amount of money the foundation has. And to break-off relationships with people I like and people that have joined me because they think it's a permanent home, to do that simply because somebody waves a big check at me would be like selling one of my children because somebody waved a big check. So I won't do that, and I want to tell my partners I won't do it so that they're not disappointed in me.

More and more with certain stocks we've got that approach. Now, if we were chronically short of funds and had all kinds of opportunities coming, we might have a somewhat different approach.

But our inclination is not to sell things unless we get really discouraged, perhaps with the management, or we think the economic characteristics of the business change in a big way, and that happens. But we're not going to sell simply because it looks too high. In all likelihood, you can't make that 100 percent but that's the principle under which we're operating.

We're generating right now 5 billion of cash a year at least, so that's 100 million bucks every week. We've been talking here half an hour and I haven't done a damn thing. So, the real question is how do you put it out intelligently, and if we were selling things it'd be just that much more, so. There may come a time when that would change. But we want to- and I have partners, shareholders, partners, who would say, "If you can get three times what See's Candy's worth, why don't you sell it?" And that's why I want to be sure before they come in, they know how I think on that. I mean they're entitled to know that.

But you really want- think for minute if you're going to get married and you want a marriage that's going to last, not necessarily the happiest marriage or one that Martha Stewart will talk about or anything, but you want a marriage that's going to last. What quality do you look for in a spouse? One quality- do you look for brains? Do you look for humor? Do you look for character? Do you look for beauty? No. You look for low expectations. That is the marriage that's going to last, if you both have low expectations. And I want my partners to be on the low side on expectations coming in because I want the marriage to last. It's a financial marriage when they join me at Berkshire and I don't want them to think I'm going to do things that I'm not going to do. So that's our guiding principle.

Steve Jobs: 'I now have the liver of a mid-20s person who died in a car crash and was generous enough to donate their organs', Apple keynote - 2009

September 2009,

Good morning. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here today with you all. As some of you may know, about five months ago I had a liver transplant, so I now have the liver of a mid-20s person who died in a car crash and was generous enough to donate their organs. I wouldn't be here without such generosity. I hope all of us can be as generous and elect to become organ donors.

I'd like to take a moment and thank everybody in the Apple community for the heartfelt support I got, too. It really meant a lot. I'd also like to especially thank Tim Cook and the entire executive team of Apple. They really rose to the occasion and ran the company very ably in that difficult period, so thank you guys. Let's give them a round of applause.

I'm vertical. I'm back at Apple. Loving every day of it. I'm getting to work with our incredibly talented teams to come up with some great new products for you all in the future. So it's wonderful, and thank you.

Steve Jobs: Apple history keynote, 'Was Geroge Orwell right about 1984?'

California, 1983

Hi, I’m Steve Jobs.

It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since. It is ten years later, the late ’60s. Digital Equipment DEC and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing and, therefore, unimportant to their business. DEC grows to become a multi-hundred-million dollar corporation before IBM finally enters the mini- computer market. It is now ten years later, the late ‘70s. In 1977, Apple, a young fledgling company on the West Coast, invents the Apple II, the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and unimportant to their business. The early ‘80s-81. Apple II has become the world’s most popular computer, and Apple has grown to a $300 million company, becoming the fastest-growing corporation in American business history. With over 50 competitors buying for a share, IBM enters the personal computer market in November of 1981 with the IBM PC.

1983. Apple and IBM emerge as the industry’s strongest competitors, each selling approximately $1 billion dollars worth of personal computers in 1983. Each will invest greater than $50 million dollars for R&D and another $50 million dollars for television advertising in 1984, totally almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined.

The shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink. Total industry losses for 1983 outshadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM for personal computers.

It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, initially welcoming IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled future. They are increasingly and desperately turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom.

IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry, –

[Audience] No

– the entire information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?

[1984 (advertisement) Apple Commercial Plays Big Brother]

Big Brother:

Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology — where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

Announcer
“On January 24th Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

That ad is going to run one week before Macintosh is introduced. And our ad agency that put it together is here today Chiat/Day, the principle Steve Hayden and who did the principle are also here and Lee Clow

Paul O'Neill: CEO Alcoa - 'Safety will be an indicator that we’re making progress' - 1987

October, 1987

I want to talk to you about worker safety.

Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work.  Our safety record is better than the general workforce, especially considering that our employees work with metals that are 1500 degrees and we have machines that can rip a man’s arm off.  But it’s not good enough.  I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America.  I intend to go for zero injuries.

[A shareholder asks about inventories in the aerospace division. Another asks about the company's capital ratios.]

I’m not certain you heard me.  If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look at our workplace safety figures.  If we bring our injury rates down, it won’t be because of cheerleading or the nonsense you sometimes hear from other CEOs.  It will be because the individuals at this company have agreed to become part of something important: They’ve devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence.  Safety will be an indicator that we’re making progress in changing our habits across the entire institution. That’s how we should be judged.