Tag: Warren Buffett

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Management Doers – A Retrospective

When I created the Management Thinkers series of articles, I always intended a proportion of the thinkers to be doers too: entrepreneurs, business leaders, and management practitioners.

In the course of over 160 articles, and nearly 200 eminent individuals, I reckon (because I’ve not counted) around 40 to 50 of them have been active practitioners.

A Range to Choose from

Some of those are pure business-people: entrepreneurs, managers and business leaders. Others have been managers at one stage of their career, and then moved into academic or thought leadership roles. If I were to include all the intellectuals and academics who have monetised their thinking with paid consulting, we’d be up to pretty nearly 100 per cent, I’d guess.

So I have plenty to choose from in selecting my favourites for you.

Next week, we start afresh with a new style of article, so I want you to be able to review my list (if you choose) in good time. This list is therefore as restrained as I could make it.

My Top Pick

And I’m starting with Jane ni Dhulchaointigh. She gets my top place for not just being a massive inspiration and someone I’d not heard of before researching her post. She is also the only entrepreneur, business leader whose product I went out and bought as a result of researching the post. Check out Sugru, if you’ve not heard of it. If you have stuff to fix, or want to adapt things to work a little differently, you need some Sugru in your fridge.

Jane ni Dhulchaointigh

Top Performer, Financially

My next pick is Warren Buffett, legendary chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. I’d buy one of Berkshire Hathaway’s shares if they didn’t cost nearly as much as my house… each. Trading at over a quarter of a million US Dollars ($250,000) per share, you can get a sense of the genius of Buffett and his long-term business partner, Charlie Munger, by looking at the stock price in 1995 ($25,000) and 1965 ($19).

Top Entrepreneurs

Of course, we can learn a lot too from business leaders. I’ll select Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), Mary Kay Ash (Mary Kay), Estee Lauder (Estee Lauder), Walt Disney (Disney), Zhang Yin (Nine Dragons), and George Eastman Kodak), as entrepreneurs who grew massive business empires and who have valuable lessons to teach us.

Top Philanthropists

Eastman was also a philanthropist and ahead of his time in the way he treated his workforce. So too was Robert Owen. His ideas management over pure command and control seem to us now, 160 years on, to be fresh and modern. I knew nothing of Owen before researching the article, and he blew me away.

Top Managers

Among pure managers and business leaders, two names stood out: a classic in Jack Welch (General Electric), and a modern hero in Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo).

Who would you pick?

Take a look at the full list of our Management Thinkers and Doers.

Who would you pick as your favourites, and why?

And who did we miss?

I’ll respond to every comment, and maybe do an article on any suggestions that I like.

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Charles Handy Part 2: The Nature of Organisations

In last week’s Pocketblog, we surveyed the life of Charles Handy, and referred to some of the big ideas in his many books. Now it’s time to look at those ideas.

The Gods of Management

In Handy’s first book, Understanding Organisations, he set out to collate and understand a wide variety of management and organisational thinking. In his second, The Gods of Management, he presented his own ideas. He perceived that organisational cultures can be classified into four broad types, according to how formal their structure is, and how centralised power is, within them. He drew the analogy with the characters of four of the olympian gods, from Greek mythology. He was, after all, an Oxford classics scholar.

The Gods of Management - Charles Handy
The Gods of Management – Charles Handy

Zeus – The Club Culture

Zeus presides over a highly centralised ‘Club’ culture, where one dominant executive holds all the reigns of power, making all of the important decisions themselves. They control al the important resources and can have low acceptance of what they perceive as under-performance. This culture tends to arise under a dominant and successful founder, or with the ascendancy of a charismatic leader. Political parties, start-ups, and crime families often share this culture.

Apollo – The Roles Culture

Mature, bureaucratic organisations adopt a solid, stable, rule-based culture, where everyone has a specific role. People know what is expected of them and will rarely step beyond those boundaries. Reporting lines are well-defined and decisions follow set procedures. Job positions confer authority to make those decisions, and processes can be long-winded and inflexible. Apollo cultures struggle to adapt to a changing environment

Athena – The Task Culture

The Athena culture is a meritocracy, where ability to think and get things done is highly valued, and rewarded well. Talent is well rewarded, and teams are fluid, with people coming together to work on projects and solve problems. Authority is less important here than knowledge, expertise and the ability to influence and persuade. You can see this culture in consultancies, research organisations, and in agile business units of larger, forward thinking businesses that may be stuck with an Apollo or Zeus culture.

Dionysus – The Existential Culture

The Dionysus culture is all about me, me, me. It serves the individuals and can lead to both creative freedom and equally internal discord and unproductive competition. The organisation is little more than the home and resource for a set of self-motivated individuals who often care more about their own position than that of the organisation. Accounting and law firms are good examples, because of the partnership nature of the businesses. So too are pressure groups.

New Organisations

In his 1989 book, The Age of Unreason, Handy started to foresee some of the changes we now take for granted. As technological and commercial realities were shifting, Handy built on his earlier book, The Future of Work, to develop new models of how we would work in the future. He further developed those ideas in The Empty Raincoat, and The Elephant and the Flea. Two of the characteristics of Handy’s books are

  • That they often take management and organisation as their starting point, but then extend their ideas outwards to reflect on the impact of society
  • Each book seems to build on and develop further, the ideas of its predecessor

Here are four of the trends and ideas that most appeal to me as both relevant to our readers, and accurate as forecasts. Inevitably, they interlink into a coherent idea-set.

Portfolio Workers

Handy’s concept of a portfolio career, with lots of components, rather than one single ‘job’ is a reality for many professionals nowadays (including me). The concept of a flexible labourer able to turn his hand to anything from agricultural work to general making and mending, to selling goods at market, to working in a tavern, is ancient. What Handy foresaw (and embraced for himself) was the emergence of this lifestyle for white collar, knowledge workers.

The Shamrock Organisation

This trend will enable what Handy describes as a Shamrock Company.

The Shamrock Organisation - Charles HandyThe Shamrock Organisation - Charles Handy
The Shamrock Organisation – Charles Handy

In the The Age of Unreason, Handy originally described three leaves, but four seems to be a fuller model: the first is the professional core of managers, technocrats, vital support staff, and a minimum of specialists. Together, they define the core competence of the business, and provide and manage its infrastructure. Everything else is provided by contracted workers: outsourced services from specialist providers, contracted independent professionals with highly specialised skills, and a flexible, lower-paid  workforce that can be brought in on short contracts and day-rates.

The Federal Organisation

Berkshire Hathaway seems to me to be the epitome of Handy’s Federal Organisation. Here, there is a tiny core business, managing a large number of highly independent businesses, all of whom have complete autonomy to manage their affairs, and succeed on their own terms. When you see the success that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have created, you have to wonder why other large federal multinationals spend so much effort trying to control their subsidiaries, impose processes and functional verticals upon them, and generally over-manage the local talent.

The Triple-I Company

The astonishing rise of internet-based software companies, web-based news aggregators, digital information providers (increasingly, Management Pocketbooks is transitioning to becoming one of these), and the high-tech consultancies that serve them, seems to me to be ample evidence of the prescience of Handy’s third kind of new organisation: one that capitalises, above all, on:

  • Ideas
  • Intelligence
  • Information

Discontinuous Thinking

Handy foresaw our current period of discontinuous change, and suggested that incremental ‘continuous’ thinking was not going to solve the problems it throws up. He doesn’t require us all to have the genius-level intellects of Einstein or Marx, but instead implies we need to build a capacity for curiosity, reframing situations, and constant learning. It seems inevitable that, once again, Pocketblog returns to the thinking of Carol Dweck, on Growth Mindset.

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Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman is a psychologist and journalist who catalysed a significant shift in the way we see human potential and capabilities – not just at work. It is not as though we did not know about the importance of our emotional response. Nor was the work he described his own. But his combination of timing, accessible writing, and psychological training made his  book, Emotional Intelligence, a stand-out best seller that started a revolution in management and leadership training.

Daniel Goleman

Short Biography

Daniel Goleman was born in 1946 and grew up in California. He went to Amherst College, Massachusetts, but spent much of his study time closer to home, at University of California, Berkeley. He majored in Anthropology, and graduated Cum Laude, winning a scholarship to study Clinical Psychology at Harvard.

There, Goleman’s mentor was David McClelland, whom he quotes in his writings. His doctoral dissertation was on meditation as a treatment for stress. He travelled to India to study ancient psychological knowledge and returned after his PhD, where further research resulted in his first book, The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience, summarising his research on meditation.

After a spell as a visiting lecturer at Harvard, teaching the psychology of consciousness, Goleman was invited to write as a journalist for Psychology Today, and found he liked writing. In 1984, he moved to the New York Times on the science editorial staff, covering psychology. While he was there, he realised that many of the stories and research he was covering came together in his mind and demanded a deeper treatment than his journalism would allow. From that, came his massive 1995 best-seller, Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ.

This ignited a huge interest in the public, and also, to Goleman’s surprise, in the business world. It led him to write Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998) and also one of the most reprinted ever of Harvard Business Review’s articles, ‘What makes a leader?’ Finding this a fertile area, and having left the New York Times, Goleman then collaborated with former Harvard Grad student colleague Richard Boyatzis, and Boyatzis’ former student Annie McKee, to write The New Leaders: Transforming the Art of Leadership (published in the US as: Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence).

Pocketblog has already covered Emotional Intelligence in earlier articles. What Goleman has given us, in summary, are a five-fold emotional intelligence framework (in Emotional Intelligence), an inventory of 25 emotional competencies (in Working with Emotional Intelligence), and six leadership styles (in The New Leaders).

For a first rate primer on the topic, you may enjoy The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook.

Goleman’s more recent work

Goleman’s actively curious mind continues to synthesise and create ideas. Having established links with the Dalai Lama, his 1997 book Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions and Health was followed in 2004 by Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

His other books include:

Focus

Goleman’s thesis in Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence is simple: to succeed in a busier, more complex world, we need to focus our attention. Variously seen as groundbreaking and disappointing, insightful or just pop psychology, there is no doubt that, in Focus, Goleman is really returning to his roots.

As a grad student, he started to ask what ancient wisdom could teach us about human psychology. In Focus, he alights on one valuable lesson: focus. I think it no coincidence that, when asked what the secret is to their great success, both Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have each cited one answer: the ability to focus on one thing at a time.

Whatever you think of the way this book is written, it is, without doubt, a message to hear.

Why aren’t we More Compassionate?

Daniel Goleman at TED, in 2007.

[ted id=200]

 

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Warren Buffett: Oracle of Omaha

At the start of every year, many thousands (possibly millions, globally) of people look forward to some New Year reading, from the richest writer in the world. Don’t rack your brains for a best-selling multi-billionnaire novelist though: the writer is Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha*.

Warren Buffett

Short Biography

Warren Buffett was born in 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska. By the age of six, he was trading in soft drinks and dreaming of becoming rich. When he was 12, his father won a seat in Congress and the family moved to Washington DC, where Buffett took on five paper rounds a day and earned the equivalent of a full time wage. He saved his money and, at 14 invested it in farmland in Nebraska, which he then rented out.

His academic career started at 17, at Wharton, but he quickly left, in search of a more practical and less theoretical education. He found it at Columbia Business School, where one of the leading thinkers in investing, Ben Graham, lectured. Graham’s ideas had a profound effect on Buffett’s investment strategies from then until now, focusing as they did on underlying value in all of its aspects.

Let’s skip lightly over the stellar performance of Buffett Partnership, Ltd – his stock investment business that managed other people’s funds, which ran from the mid 1950s to 1969. He closed it down to focus on investing through Berkshire Hathaway. At first it was a textile business that Buffett acquired in 1965.  It eventually closed all its mills in 1985, but by then it was the core of a diverse portfolio of businesses. Its shareholders profit from massive stock performance that frequently outstrips industry averages by a wide margin, generated by Buffett’s choice of outright acquisitions and stock purchases.

Once a year, at the start of the year, Buffett writes a long letter to his shareholders. It explains carefully Buffett’s assessment of the year past and the future of the business. It combines folksy humour, wry metaphor, and deep insight. It is widely read not just by investors and analysts, for whom it is a professional interest, but by folk like me, who see it as a fascinating exercise in communication, combined with a source of interesting insight.

What can we learn from Warren Buffett?

There are very many websites and articles purporting to extract lessons from one of the world’s most successful and penetrating business minds. What a surprise! But I am determined to add another, because I won’t be thinking about investing; that’s not my thing. Instead, I am going to focus on what I think day-to-day managers and business leaders can learn about doing your job well.

Keep it Simple

Buffett likes investing in simple businesses that he can fully understand. As a manager, keep it simple and don’t take on something you don’t understand. So, if you need to take on something you don’t understand, then make it your urgent business to understand it.

Character / Integrity / Reputation

They all amount to the same thing. Buffett puts an astronomical premium on these. As well as his annual letter, Buffett issues a biennial memo to the CEOs of the businesses Berkshire Hathaway owns, his ‘all stars’. These are not published but frequently leak onto the web. Here are two extracts from the most recent (December 2014), which clearly makes his point.

The top priority — trumping everything else, including profits — is that all of us continue to guard Berkshire’s reputation… As I’ve said in these memos for more than 25 years: “We can afford to lose money — even a lot of money. But we can’t afford to lose reputation — even a shred of reputation.”

Sometimes your associates will say “Everybody else is doing it.” This rationale is almost always a bad one if it is the main justification for a business action. It is totally unacceptable when evaluating a moral decision.

Select for leadership on track record, and then trust your leader

This is Buffett’s approach and it applies to any manager who appoints supervisors, or any leader who appoints managers. Experience matters – look for evidence. When you get the right person, trust them enough to give them the autonomy that will allow them to add to your leadership, rather than be subordinate to it.

Merit is all that matters

This one is simple: Buffett rejects all judgements based on gender, race, or age. So too should you. The person that has the skills and energy to excel in a role is the person for the job.

Rational decisions

Trust the numbers too. Do everything you can to understand the nature of cognitive bias. Study the facts and work hard to eliminate any other influence over your choices. You will get things wrong, just as Buffett has done on many occasions. But each time he does, he analyses it and discusses it in clear objective tones without a trace of blame for anything other than his failings in judgement. He takes away the lessons and uses them.

Trends not Headlines

Buffett rejects knee-jerk reactions to headlines and focuses on the big picture underneath them. When he is ready he makes decisions rapidly, but he won’t be hustled.

The only memo to his all stars that is on the Berkshire Hathaway website is also the most astonishing piece of business communication I have seen. Two things strike me as remarkable. The steadying calm and confidence with which it is written, and the remarkable strength that a business would need to have for its CEO to be able to say the things he does. It is a short note, so to reproduce anything valuable from it would doubtless be morally a breach of copyright even if it stayed on the right side of the law, so do have a look at it. The context may be obvious when I tell you the memo was issued on 26 September, 2001. The message from Warren Buffett is on the Berkshire Hathaway site.

Read Voraciously

Warren Buffett and his business partner, Berkshire Hathaway Vice-Chairman Charlie Munger, both set aside large chunks of their working day to read. They read all sorts of stuff and the breadth and depth of their reading gives them both profound understanding and a wide context. This commitment to learning is what you need if you are to grow in wisdom and make sound decisions more often.

Obsess over detail

There isn’t much to say about this but to note that the big picture is all very well and an appealing target for leaders’ attention, but the details are often where the differences get made. The skill, of course, is to figure out which details (see paragraph above for the best technique).

Delegate everything that is not strategic

In Buffett’s case, deciding how to invest Berkshire Hathaway’s assets is the strategic role he fills. Everything else – and in particular the operation of the Berkshire Hathaway businesses, he delegates completely. While he makes himself available to his All Stars for a conversation 24 hours a day if they need it, he does not require them to communicate with him more than once every two years. At that time, each is required to put one name in a sealed envelope and send it to him. This name is that of the most suitable successor, should the business CEO be suddenly unable to fulfil their role.

Right, that’s me done, I’m off to do the ironing. ‘Delegate it’ you say. ‘Indeed’, says my wife!

 

* Although Buffett is also known as the Sage of Omaha and the Wizard of Omaha, Oracle is the term he himself favours.

 

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What matters today, in Business and Management?

Two weeks ago, we published a blog about the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett, and The Management Pocketblog had one of our best weeks ever in terms of readers.

Time Magazine 2012 100 Most Influential People in the WorldCuriously, in the same week (our blogs are usually written one to two weeks ahead), Time Magazine published their 2012 special edition: ‘The 100 Most Influential People in the World’.  Warren Buffett is there (on page 71) with an appreciation written by… President Obama!

The quality of many of their nominations is attested by the quality of the people who have written about them – often far better known, than their subjects.  So I thought it an informative exercise to trawl the articles in the section headed ‘Moguls’ for indications of what passes for influential, these days.

Please note, that I don’t endorse the individuals, nor attest to their doing what is claimed of them.  I merely note that what is claimed of them as an important achievement tells us something of what is valued in business and management today.

1: See the way the world is going

The Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg is praised for her understanding of the impact of social media on society.  Like it or loathe it, that has to be correct: how can you pretend to any credibility in a senior role without at least engaging with the discussions and understanding the beast?

2: A Commitment to the Arts

Both Chen Lihua, philanthropist and owner of Fu Wah International Group, and Walmart heir, Alice Walton, are praised as collectors and patrons of the arts.  We aren’t all that fortunate that we can give away fortunes to pursue these passions but, while we live in societies with freely or cheaply available national and local galleries and museums, we have no excuse for not broadening our perspectives with a deeper appreciation of the beauty and insights of other cultures and our own.

3: Do it with Grace

Daniel Ek founded Spotify. If that name means nothing but you do enjoy music, then you need to take a look.  He is praised for ‘doing what he loves, doing it well and giving away all the credit.’  Wow!  That would make an epitaph I’d be proud of.  Having studied many people that the world considers wise, these are all components of a commonly-recurring philosophy.

4: Contribution

The new CEO of IBM is, for the first time, a woman: Virginia Rommety.  She is praised as an advocate of corporate responsibility – particularly in the fields of education, job creation and small local businesses.  What do you do or advocate for within your organisation that gives it a more robust place in its community?

5: Faith in yourself

Sara Blakely is a billionaire who founded an underwear business with $5,000.  No one had the confidence to invest in her business, but she trusted her gut: or should I say ‘she trusted her judgement about America’s attitudes to their guts’?

6: Discipline and Calm

The cult of personality and the tyrant-leader are powerful clichés, but I doubt either can deliver powerful results – at least, not sustainably.  New Apple CEO Tim Cook is praised for his calmness, his thoughtfulness, his ethical behaviour and his personal discipline.  Score 1 point for wisdom

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The Oracle of Omaha

I have been reading a remarkable and unusual book about a remarkable and unusual business, and learning some remarkable – and sometimes unusual – things.

Warren Buffett speaking to a group of students from the Kansas University School of Business - Work of Mark Hirschey

The business is one of the most impressive in the world – often described as the best business to work for – and it is run by Warren Buffett, a man for whom ego plays no part at all in his business life or management style.  Yet this is also a man who sits atop a company with over 250,000 employees, assets of nearly $400 billion, and an annual net income of over $10 billion.  That company is Berkshire Hathaway.

 

The Remarkable Book

The remarkable and unusual book I have been reading is called “The Warren Buffett CEO” by Robert P Miles and it is remarkable as a tribute to a great manager, because it is primarily not about Buffett.  It is about the great CEOs he hires.

The extent to which it is about Buffett is that it demonstrates how his careful selection of CEO – based almost entirely on character, rather than credentials, resumes or recommendations – and then his ability to leave them alone to run their businesses makes him “”the best boss in the world”.  Of course, he doesn’t abandon them: he is available any time for a phone conversation and many of them take the opportunity, because they learn from him whenever they do.

Many, Many Remarkable Managers

The book is actually about the stories, personalities and management styles of a selection of Buffett’s CEOs: his “All Stars”.  There is much to learn from these men and women (mostly middle aged men, it must be observed).  Each chapter focuses on one or two of them and each ends with a short selection of their business tenets.

I’d like to share some of my favourites.

Warren Buffett CEO Management Tenets

‘Go out of your way to help your managers.
Stan Lipsey

‘Success in any field can be achieved by staying disciplined.’
Al Ueltschi

‘Mandatory retirement is not a policy I endorse.  As long as someone is healthy and interested in working, he or she should stay on the job.  The intelligence and experience of older people can be a tremendous asset.’
Chuck Higgins – in 2001

‘Try to get along with everyone.  Having a positive attitude affects the people around you.’
Susan Jacques

‘Honesty and integrity should govern all your business decisions.’
Harold Melton

‘View your staff as if they were family.’
Irvin Blumkin

‘If you’re on the fence about a particular deal, then you probably should decline and move on to the next opportunity.’
Ajit Jain

And finally, I think more big businesses should think like this: it’s a paragraph in a letter Buffett wrote to the CEOs of the Berkshire Hathaway businesses.

‘We can afford to lose money – even a lot of money.  We cannot afford to lose reputation – even a shred of reputation.’

or, as Othello says:

‘Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.’

These are only a tiny sampling from a magnificent book.
Do find yourself a copy.

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