저자: WarrenBuffett · 외국인
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버핏과 멍거가 MBA·인재 평가의 한계를 논하며, 사업 성공은 기질(wiring)과 조기 사업 경험에 상관이 크다고 말함. 실적 예측 압박과 분기 실적 관리 문화의 해악을 강조하고, 버크셔는 분기 예산을 내지 않으며 경영진에게 실적 목표를 주지 않는다고 설명. 특정 자산의 가격 방향 예측 발언은 없음.
다듬은 글
I'm not sure I can go, in fact, I'm quite sure I can't go to an MBA class of 50 and sit down and talk with each one, examine their grades, examine their extracurricular activities, and whatever, talk to their parents. I'm not sure I could rank those 50 very well in terms of their potential for future business success.
And of course, some of it would depend on on on what areas they entered into in business. So, I think it's tough. I think it's tough to go out to the practice tee uh where people are not actually hitting balls, but just taking practice swings, and say which one is a you know, is a two handicap, and which one's a a 15 handicap, and which one's you know, can make it on the tour.
I think I can tell a little bit maybe, but not but it's it's very hard to calibrate. Um and I don't think we've had much success, but we have also haven't tried very much to identify people before they've had a record to try and identify the ones that are superstars. Instead, we've taken the easy way, and we go and somebody comes to us with a business that's done phenomenally for 10 or 15 or 20 years, or maybe for 50 years, and we've seen how what their batting average is.
We've actually seen they batted 350 or whatever it may be in the major leagues, and we just to make the assumption that we won't screw it up by hiring them. And and we also make the assumption that they'll live to be 100 or 120 or something, and and we buy the business. And that's far easier. It is far easier to tell the great baseball batters after you've seen a couple seasons of their batting than it is to to go to a college uh even college baseball teams or high school baseball teams and pick out the superstars.
The one interesting thing, and I wish I could remember where I saw this study, and it may not it it may not even be a valid study, but I I do remember seeing something many many years ago where they tried to correlate business success with various variables and they took grades in school and whether they got MBAs and all that sort of thing and they found that the best correlation was with the age at which they started their own business first.
The people that got very interested in starting lemonade stands or whatever tended to have better uh that tended to correlate better with business success than other variables. We have found ourselves we've got we've got a lot of MBAs running businesses for us but they ran them for a long time before we hired them or before we made the deal and we've got others that never set foot in a business school and I do think there's a lot to wiring.
I think there's also a lot to working with the wiring you have and developing it and over time. I don't think that it's I don't think it's all innate and I don't think you can't improve. I know you can improve on what what you're given at birth but I do think a lot an awful lot of it's wiring more so than I would have thought 30 or 40 years ago and I uh I've certainly seen it in business.
I can there are people no formal business training. Charlie never went to business school. I mean but he thought about it. I mean I never heard him Charlie say anything dumb about business yet except when he disagrees with me. The which and I the truth is I've never heard him say anything dumb about business period and there are other people I've never heard Tony Nicely say anything dumb about business ever.
Uh they just they're wired so that they that the you know, it doesn't flicker. I mean they they they they they get the answers. It doesn't mean they can you know, they'd be a great ballroom dancer or a great baseball player or you know, great politician but they are they are wired for business. Charlie?
Yeah, part of it's intelligence and part of it is temperament. I don't know if Bill Gann is in the audience, but by the time I was 14 years of age, I knew Bill Gann would be rich. He was a classmate of mine high school. A very intelligent man, and he wanted to be rich. And he was sensible in the way he handled life.
I think sensible people with the right temperament and the right intelligence, if they live long enough in our system, will get rich. But temperament is, I think, to some extent inherited, too. Don't you? His daughter, incidentally, is a partner with my daughter in a knit shop, which I hope you'll patronize while you're We've united again.
And the Buffett family. Charlie, I When did you first think business was something of interest to you? Uh uh very early. I I loved I loved games of chance. And I loved trying to learn how to win at them. Yeah, it's interesting for me, you know, simply to think about the question of whether the final four of the NCAA will be will be uh canceled as opposed to postponed or or transferred in locale, and then decide if we're going to pay out $75 million the next day if it is canceled, then how much we want to receive in today to take care of that.
And that probably wouldn't interest It'd all kinds of people that wouldn't be interesting to. And and since my dad wouldn't let me become a bookmaker, I went into investments. But we've got 180,000 people out there, and uh I'll guarantee you something is going wrong someplace uh as we talk. That's just the nature of it.
But what you what you hope is that it's relatively unimportant or that we catch it. And uh uh but that's, you know, that that that is something that that uh we know will happen. We try to have a culture that minimizes that, and I think we do have a culture that minimizes that. We it's very important in our view to have the right incentives.
And many places we think have incentives that aren't so good. Uh I mean, when I get on an airplane and we own the company like NetJets, the last thing in the world I want to tell the pilot is that I'm running late and I hope we can get to New York a little faster. I mean, that is dumb uh to incent a pilot who may be worried that, you know, somehow you affect his job or something to get in a hurry about the takeoff or the checklist or whatever it may be.
And companies do that time after time in their compensation plans or things that they they incent people, in our view at least, to some of the wrong things. That doesn't mean nothing wrong will happen under any circumstances, but you should not have a system that causes people to uh for example, worry about quarterly earnings.
None of our our managers do not submit budgets in Omaha. I have no idea what we're going to earn next quarter, and I have I have no implicit body language out there or anything of the sort to our managers that I may hoping to earn X dollars per share in the quarter because in the insurance business particularly, you can report any numbers basically that you want to if you write long tail business for a short period of time.
And you know, we've got 45 billion of loss reserves. Well, who knows whether the right figure is 45 billion or 46 or 44. And if the desire is to report some given number in a given quarter, instead of saying 45 billion, you say 44 and 3/4 billion or something of the sort. So, we have no incentives in terms of the how people are paid or in terms of the fact they just don't want to let me down.
Let's assume at start of the year I asked everybody to submit budgets, and then I went out in Wall Street and preached a bunch of numbers. Even if their compensation didn't depend on it, the managers would feel, you know, we don't want to let Mohnish down on this, so you know, we'll take an optimistic view of reserves.
And that's easy to do at the end of the quarter, and then and and we won't let him down, and then he won't look like a jerk in front of Wall Street. So, we we try to avoid that sort of thing. Um but even then, that is what we worry about. We don't worry about this place making money. I mean, we'll we'll make money.
And if we don't, it's my fault, and the uh that's not that's not the problem. Uh uh the problem right now, in addition um to the one we just talked about, the problem is deploying capital, and that's my job, too. And you know, I haven't done a very good job of that recently. But with a little luck, you know, we will in a different kind of market situation, we will get a chance to do that.
Uh Charlie? Yeah, well, if you stop to think about it, the history of much of which we do don't like in modern corporate capitalism comes from an unreasonable expectation communicated from headquarters that earnings have to go up with no volatility and great regularity, corporate earnings, I mean. That kind of an expectation from headquarters is not just the kissing cousin of evil, it's the blood brother of evil.
And we just don't need that blood brother in our headquarters. Businesses do not meet expectations quarter after quarter and year after year. It just isn't in the nature of running businesses. Um and in our view, people that predict precisely what the future will will be are either kidding investors or they're kidding themselves or they're getting both and and Charlie and I have been around culture sometimes on the board where the ego of the CEO became very involved in meeting predictions which were impossible really over time and everybody in the organization knew because they were very public about it what these predictions were and they knew that their CEO was going to look bad if they weren't met and that can lead to a lot of bad things.
You get enough bad things anyway. I mean, but but setting up a system that either exerts financial or psychological pressure on the people around you to do things that they they probably really really don't even want to do in order to avoid disappointing you. I mean, I just think that that's it's a it's a terrible mistake and and uh you know, we'll try to avoid it. But
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