QuestionerWhat can you advise on how in one hour you can assess the capability of a person to be a good manager?
WarrenWell, you have to understand that we cheat. We buy businesses with good managers. So if you give me 100 MBAs, and I have these classes come out all the time. Dalma, I've had about 30 schools this year, and usually there's 75 or 100 men and women in the classes. I know more could take those hundred and spend a few hours and rank them from number one to 100 in terms of their future achievements as managers, you know, that I could pick them, you know. It would be impossible for me. But what we do is we buy businesses with great managers in place. We've seen those people perform for, in many cases, decades. We've seen their record, and they come with the business. Now, our job. is not so much to select great managers, because we do have this proven record that they come with. Our job is to retain them. And many of the managers, a majority of the managers that work at Berkshire, are independently wealthy. We hand them checks sometimes in the billions, often in the hundreds of millions. So they do not have a monetary reason to work in many cases. So our job, we are dependent on that incidentally. I mean, we have 19 or so people at that. headquarters and we have 250,000 working for Berkshire around the world, and we can't run their businesses. And our job is to make sure that they have the same enthusiasm, excitement, passion for their job after the stock certificate changes hands than they had before. Now that requires some judgment on our part as to whether these people love the business or love the money. Now, they all like money. But many of them, well, our managers in particular, they love their businesses. I mean, they've worked out of, they're a work of art to them, and they've been in the family sometimes as many as four generations. So we have to see the passion in their eyes. And if we see that, then we have to behave in a way that that that passion remains.