Quotes About Managers

We are suspicious of those CEOs who regularly claim they do know the future—and we become downright incredulous if they consistently reach their declared targets. Managers that always promise to "make the numbers" will at some point be tempted to make up the numbers.

For Buffett, managers are stewards of shareholder capital. The best managers think like owners in making business decisions.

Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me when we contemplate investing in businesses that in general look outstanding. All too often, we've seen value stagnate in the presence of hubris or of boredom that caused the attention of managers to wander.

Regardless of the impact upon immediately reportable earnings, we would rather buy 10% of Wonderful Business T at X per share than 100% of T at 2x per share. Most corporate managers prefer just the reverse.

Managers who want to expand their domain at the expense of owners might better consider a career in government.

Our goal will be to acquire either part or all of businesses that we believe we understand, that have good, sustainable underlying economics, and that are run by managers whom we like, admire and trust.

Accounting numbers, of course, are the language of business and as such are of enormous help to anyone evaluating the worth of a business and tracking its progress. Charlie and I would be lost without these numbers: they invariably are the starting point for us in evaluating our own businesses and those of others. Managers and owners need to remember, however, that accounting is but an aid to business thinking, never a substitute for it.

But we will never allow Berkshire to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations and multiple layers of management. Instead, we plan to operate as a collection of separately-managed medium-sized and large businesses, most of whose decision-making occurs at the operating level. Charlie and I will limit ourselves to allocating capital, controlling enterprise risk, choosing managers and setting their compensation.

A CEO's behavior has a huge impact on managers down the line: If it's clear to them that shareholders' interests are paramount to him, they will, with few exceptions, also embrace that way of thinking.

He is also experienced. Though I don't know Ralph's age, I do know that, like many of our managers, he is over 65. At Berkshire, we look to performance, not to the calendar. Charlie and I, at 71 and 64 respectively, now keep George Foreman's picture on our desks. You can make book that our scorn for a mandatory retirement age will grow stronger every year.

Such innovation and learning will come only from people who are in touch with the voice of the customer and the voice of the process. It can not come from people who act only on instructions from top managers who are immersed in a fog of information about financial results.

What I believe has happened in American businesses since the 1950s is that managers and operating personnel at all levels have lost sight of people, customers, and processes as top management has turned everyone's attention to accounting results.

Moreover, even if they are eventually weeded out, one-sided managerial compensation packages impose huge costs on the rest of the economy while they last. The workers have to be constantly squeezed through downward pressure on wages, casualization of employment and permanent downsizing, so that the managers can generate enough extra profits to distribute to the shareholders and keep them from raising issues with high executive pay (for more on this, see Thing 2).

Of course, collaring and tracking all bears is illogical, unreasonable, and unnatural from the point of view of park managers, regardless of one judge's opinion. It can traumatize the bears, make the bears look artificial instead of natural, cost a lot of money in radios and monitoring personnel, and give the public the perception that a national park is like the movie Westworld (all mechanical) rather than a natural preserve.

People aren't going to talk about it except me and that is communication and the visits I have personally had in our meetings with our store managers saying if you do these things you will be terminated, period.

I've been unlucky because I've had a few ups and downs with different managers but I would say I've never been out of shape.

I didn't want to chase movies. It's too hard. You've got to work at it - opening nights, photo shoots, publicity people, managers. I never wanted to do that. I'm too lazy.

I don't envisage I will be captain again, but for two England managers, Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello, I was their first choice and I'm proud of that.

The ability to select stocks, manage them over time and know when to sell them is incredibly difficult, even for professional fund managers.

To not look at the data is foolish, but to look at the data as having all the answers is even more foolish. It is a collision of new-school statistics and statisticians against old-school managers, coaches, and instructors. Neither side is right, neither is wrong; there is so much to be gained from listening to both sides.

In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.

Instead of authority and consequence (the management staples of the factory floor), the best knowledge-work managers are known for their powers of persuasion, negotiation, markers to call in, and their large reserves of accumulated trust.

These managers all know their onions and cut their cloth accordingly.

We see similar thinking in managers who feel you can just throw a group of people together and hope that a team will form. If the right people luckily end up in the group, if the chemistry is just right, and if the situation is perfect, a team might develop.