저자: 워런버핏 · 외국인
요약 보기
버핏의 성공 원칙 강연 발췌: 가치 있는 멘토(히어로)를 선택하고 그들의 행동을 본받아야 한다는 조언. 인재 채용 시에는 정직성(integrity), 지능, 에너지 순으로 보며, 정직성이 없으면 나머지 능력이 오히려 해가 된다고 강조. 의사결정 기준으로 법적 기준뿐 아니라 '신문 테스트'(다음 날 지역 신문에 보도돼도 떳떳한가)를 제시하고, 애매하면 하지 않는다는 원칙을 강조. 평판은 돈보다 중요한 자산이며 회사의 가장 큰 자산이라는 관점. 투자 측면에서는 Moody's·S&P 매뉴얼을 탐독하며 분석에 몰입했던 젊은 시절과 독서 습관(하루 5~6시간, 일간지·10-K 등)을 회고. 가장 큰 실수는 실제 손실보다 '알았음에도 실행하지 않은 기회'(기회손실)이며, 마이크로소프트를 일찍 사지 않은 사례 등을 언급. 실수에 오래 집착하지 말 것을 조언. 자본주의에서는 경쟁자가 모방하므로 저비용 생산, 탁월한 인재 등 지속 가능한 경쟁우위(해자)를 가진 기업이 중요하다고 설명. 영상 내 특정 종목·자산에 대한 가격 방향 예측 발언은 없음.
다듬은 글
you is it enormously important they have the right heroes in life and then it's enormously important that they never let you down, and I've been unbelievably fortunate in having those heroes. Perhaps a dozen or so, led by my father and my first wife, and they had a huge impact on me, but a number of other people have as well, and never in my life have I thought I was let down by them. I tell the students, you know, the most important job they have, for most of them, is going to be the teacher of their children. You start out as your children's hero, and you don't get a second chance at that rollout. That child looks to you and forms its opinion of the world, its attitude, its behavior, starting with what they see in you. I had enormous good fortune in that respect. In the investing world I had Graham, and my partner Charlie Munger, who taught me all kinds of things. There are several members of our Board of Directors who have had a huge influence on my life. So it is important they have the right heroes and select them with care. Yeah, but when you find them you will be a better person if you look at the qualities in them that you admire and then you say, why can't I have these same qualities? That's the beauty of wonderful heroes: you get to see an action or behavior that inspires you, and then you have to ask yourself why you can't behave in a similar manner. You will be a better person because of that.
We have all the money we need. We'd like to have more, but we can afford to lose money. We can't afford to lose reputation. Not a shred of reputation. Therefore I ask the managers to judge every action they take, not just by legal standards, although obviously that's the first test, but also by what I call the newspaper test: how would they feel about any given action if they knew it was to be written up the next day in their local paper, to be read by their family, their friends, their neighbors, written by a smart but kind of unfriendly reporter? If it passes that test, it's okay. I tell them, if anything is close to the line, it's out, and they can always call me if they want to check something. But if they call me, there's probably something wrong with it anyway. That's about it. We pay our Board of Directors nine hundred dollars a year, and I really would like to pay them more, but the bills are so far ahead of me on that Forbes list already. I don't want to get many more. Three things I look for in hiring people: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And he said, if that person didn't have the first two, the latter two would kill him, because if they don't have integrity, you want them dumb and lazy. You don't want them smart and energetic, fired up to do what they do.
You aspire to become a very wealthy person. Would you want to be buying US stocks? What do you want to buy, companies? What was your aspiration in those early days? I loved analyzing securities. I just spent hours and hours and hours. I kept turning the pages of Moody's, because there was no internet, so you had two sources of information, Moody's and Standard & Poor's. We happened to have these sets of Moody's, about 8,000 pages in aggregate, about five different manuals, and I went through those page by page. It must have been exciting to you. Yeah, it's a little strange. I actually went to Amazon a few years ago and found an old 1951 Moody's. Now everybody else is going there for Playboy magazine, but I'm buying old Moody's. They've got a straight guy here.
The worst investment I ever made? How long do you have? I've made some very bad ones, but that doesn't really bother me. What bothers me is when it bothers the shareholders, but that's another question. You're going to make mistakes in life, there's no question about it. You don't want to make them on the big decisions, like who you marry and things like that. So there's no way I'm going to make a lot of business and investment decisions without making some mistakes. I may try to minimize them, but I don't dwell on them at all. I don't look back. The biggest mistakes are the ones that don't actually show up, the mistakes of omission rather than commission. We've never lost that much money on any one investment, but it's the things I knew enough to do that I didn't do. We have missed profits of maybe as much as 10 billion dollars in things I knew enough to do and didn't do. Now, the fact that they didn't buy Microsoft way back is not a forgone opportunity, because I didn't know enough to make that decision. But there have been other investments where I did know enough to make the decision, and for one reason or another I either didn't do it at all or I did it on a small scale. I was sucking my thumb when I should have been writing checks. Those don't show up. There's no place where missed opportunities show, but I've missed some big ones. The triumphs in life are partly about knowing that everything isn't going to be a triumph. I would never get too hung up on mistakes. I know a lot of people who really agonize over them, and it just isn't worth it. Tomorrow's another day. You live it forward and just go on to the next thing.
The nature of capitalism is that people want to come in and take your castles, perfectly understandable. If I'm selling television sets or something, there are going to be ten other people trying to sell a better television set. If I have a restaurant here in Omaha, people are going to try to copy my menu, get more parking, and take my chef, and so on. So capitalism is all about somebody coming and trying to take the castle. What you need is a castle that has some durable competitive advantage, a castle with a moat around it. One of the best moats, in many respects, is being a low-cost producer, but sometimes the moat is just having more talent. If you're the heavyweight champion of the world and keep knocking out people, you've got a competitive advantage. If you can keep doing that, and it's very profitable, and you're the one who happens to be able to do it, if you can turn out great motion pictures, you know, Steven Spielberg, he has an enormous economic moat.
I just read and read and read. I probably read five to six hours a day. I don't read as fast now as when I was younger, but I read five daily newspapers, a fair number of magazines, 10-Ks, annual reports, and a lot of other things. I've always enjoyed reading. I love reading biographies.
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