The Warren Buffett You Don't Know (2 of 2)
In Buffett's view, the quality of a company's management is integral to its value as a business. And when acquiring companies, Buffett is as concerned with the motives of the selling CEOs as he is with their abilities. ''What I must understand is why someone will continue to get out of bed in the morning once they have all the money they could want,'' Buffett says. ''Do they love the business, or do they love the money?''
No less an authority than John F. Welch, CEO of General Electric Co., considers Buffett a superb judge of managerial talent. Buffett and Welch have gotten to know each other over the years as golf partners and as rivals in auto insurance and other businesses. ''Take 20 people you know quite well but Warren has just met casually,'' Welch says. ''If you ask Warren his opinion about them, he'll have each one nailed. He's a masterful evaluator of people, and that's the biggest job there is in running a company.''
In 34 years, Berkshire has never lost an operating chief except to death. In fact, the great majority of its subsidiaries are still run by the same executive who brought them to Berkshire in the first place. The operating head of longest tenure is Charles N. Huggins, who has been president of See's Candies since Buffett acquired it. Huggins is 74 years old now, but he's not Berkshire's oldest manager. That would be 85-year-old Harold Alfond, who founded Dexter Shoe Co. in 1956 and sold to Buffett in 1993 for Berkshire shares now worth $1.5 billion.
Berkshire's operating ranks contain a second octogenarian billionaire: 82-year-old Albert L. Ueltschi, chairman and CEO of FlightSafety International Inc., a pilot-training concern Berkshire bought for $1.5 billion in 1996. An ex-pilot, Ueltschi founded the company in a LaGuardia Airport hangar in 1951. ''I'm like Warren,'' says Ueltschi, who has no plans to retire. ''I like what I do so much that I don't consider it work.''
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Somewhere between Frankfurt and Paris, Buffett gets up and walks back to the airplane's pantry to fetch a box of Swiss Sprungli chocolates an admirer had given him in Germany. Buffett makes his way slowly up the aisle of the plane in his shirtsleeves, offering the candy to each passenger aboard.
A half-empty box of See's chocolates rests on the table where I'm sitting. Buffett pops a piece in his mouth. I ask him whether he thinks he could identify See's in a blind taste test against other brands. ''Of course,'' he says. ''I can also tell Coke from Pepsi. The thing is, most Americans prefer Pepsi to Coke because it is 4% sweeter, but Coke still outsells Pepsi by a huge margin.''
As Buffett continues in this vein, he starts staring at the box of Sprungli he carries. He shifts it to one hand as if he were about to choose a piece, then seems to change his mind. ''It's a showy sort of candy, isn't it?'' he says and then falls silent. He gazes raptly at the Sprungli for a full 45 seconds as the conversation continues around him. Then he abruptly sets the box down and returns to his seat without a word.
Later, I recount this to Chuck Huggins, See's president, who chuckles knowingly. ''Yeah, that's Warren. Brand-loyal.''
The office next to Buffett's is occupied by Michael Goldberg. A former McKinsey & Co. consultant, Goldberg was hired in 1981 to bring order to Berkshire's far-flung insurance interests and essentially functioned as chief operating officer for the next 11 years. The single-minded intensity Goldberg brought to the job created friction in the ranks--and gave him a bad case of burnout. In 1993, Buffett reassigned Goldberg to ''special projects'' and eliminated his old position.
The line managers who once reported to Goldberg, now 53, have reported directly to Buffett ever since--as do the chiefs of all 22 of Berkshire's operating companies. Buffett essentially lets the chiefs of the companies that Berkshire acquires run their businesses as before, except that he requires them to transfer their excess cash to Omaha and clear capital-spending plans with him. Buffett, who thinks of his role as Berkshire's ''capital allocator,'' collects the enormous cash flow that the subs produce--$13.4 billion last year--and uses the money to buy more businesses, either in whole or in part, through the stock market.
Buffett tends not to initiate contact with his operating executives: He waits for the phone to ring. ''Let me know about any bad news as soon as possible,'' he tells his subordinates, ''but otherwise, you are free to call me as often or as seldom as you like.'' Buffett's managerial passivity should not be mistaken for indifference. Some operating chiefs say he nearly memorizes the monthly reports they send to Omaha.
During holiday seasons, Buffett requests daily sales reports from See's and Borsheim's, Berkshire's huge upscale jeweler in Omaha, because the ebb and flow of retailing hold an enduring fascination for him. Year-round, he speaks to two execs almost every day: Richard Santulli and Ajit Jain, who runs Berkshire's reinsurance business in Stamford, Conn.
Berkshire's homegrown insurance group offers a variety of property-and-casualty coverage in certain U.S. markets. But its chief business is a high-risk, high-reward specialty that Jain developed over the past decade in reinsuring ''super-catastrophes''--earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and such. Buffett found the economics of ''super-cat'' seductive: Berkshire has made at least $865 million pretax in underwriting profits since 1991. But it was the complexities of analyzing super-cat risk that hooked him. Says Jain, 47: ''Warren and I might have had a 30-second conversation or a 30-minute one, but he has been involved in every piece of business I have done.''
As for Santulli's business, Buffett is intrigued not just by the novel challenges posed by EJA's rapid growth but also the logistical complexities of the fractional-shares business. ''He likes the mental challenge of it,'' says Santulli, a former mathematics professor. ''He calls it 3-D chess.'' Even so, Buffett is careful not to impinge on Santulli's operating authority. EJA's chief once asked Buffett for advice in making a decision and was rebuffed. ''Don't bother with that,'' Buffett told him. ''Just decide.''
Buffett's laissez-faire management style has been tested most severely in recent years by Berkshire's misadventures in shoes. From 1991 to 1993, Buffett laid out $650 million to buy three old-line makers of midprice shoes: H.H. Brown, Lowell, and Dexter. In essence, he was betting that his companies would benefit as the appeal of imports waned and U.S. consumers returned to home brands. Buffett hasn't made many fundamental strategic errors, but this was a doozy: Imports now account for 95% of domestic shoe purchases, vs. 70% in the early 1990s. Since 1994, operating profits of Berkshire's shoe group have plummeted 57% on an 18% decline in revenues.
Dexter has fared much worse than Brown, which absorbed Lowell and has buoyed itself by shifting much of its production offshore. Although Dexter now does some manufacturing in Puerto Rico, it has placed overriding emphasis on maintaining full employment at its four factories in its home state of Maine. By all accounts, Buffett has played no part in this divergence in basic strategy--and performance--between H.H. Brown and Dexter except to countenance it by his silence. ''It's amazing how little he bothers you,'' says Francis Rooney, chairman and CEO of H.H. Brown. ''He never even comments.''
The deference Buffett shows Berkshire's subsidiaries is all the more remarkable because it does not come naturally to him. ''With almost every one of the companies Berkshire owns, I think I would do something different if I was running them--in some cases, substantially different,'' Buffett says. The reason he doesn't impose his views, he adds, ''is simply that I am not inclined to make myself unhappy. I sort of accept things as they come.''
It's not that simple. Buffett knows the sort of self-motivated, hands-on exec he covets wouldn't tolerate being pushed around by Omaha. And Buffett's respectful treatment of his managers has instilled in them an ambition to ''make Warren proud,'' as one puts it. ''Somehow, Warren has been able to keep a diverse cast of characters working harder for him than they did for themselves,'' Goldberg says. ''I see it every day--and I still don't know how he does it. But I do know that all of us feel this incredible responsibility to him.''
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We arrive late to Paris, touching down in a freakish, near-gale-force windstorm that both thrills and alarms our pilot. In four cars, we race as fast as rush-hour Paris traffic allows from Le Bourget to Dassault Aviation Group's magnificent 19th century chateau--familiarly known as Le Rond Point--on the Champs Elysees. EJA is the largest commercial customer of Dassault Aviation, Europe's leading manufacturer of business jets. Serge Dassault, the company's chairman, is hosting tonight's gala reception and dinner in Buffett's honor. By the time we arrive, the reception is in full swing. But Buffett takes a few steps into the foyer and hustles up a flight of stairs. It will be a good 35 minutes until he descends and joins the party.
Downstairs, the guest of honor's whereabouts is Topic A among Dassault's distinguished guests. It might puzzle them to learn that Buffett is on a transatlantic call to one of his employees. The matter he is discussing with Ajit Jain this evening is not urgent. But it is Buffett's custom to speak with Jain every evening. If that means keeping 200 of France's richest people waiting, then c'est la vie.
In mid-May, Buffett moderated a panel on Internet commerce at Microsoft's annual CEO summit in Seattle. As Buffett tells it, the assignment reflected William H. Gates III's sense of humor. But the Microsoft chairman and CEO, a friend of Buffett's since 1991, says it was no joke: ''Every principle that Warren holds about business and business value will still apply in this new world we're going into.'' Gates, who owns Berkshire stock in his personal account, adds that he has learned more about business from Buffett than from anyone else. ''People really underestimate what he has created in Berkshire,'' he says.
Unlike most megacorporations, Berkshire was not erected on the foundation of a single great business. Buffett began with a dying textile maker and parlayed its dwindling cash flow into ownership of a massive portfolio of enduringly profitable operating businesses. By the end of 1998, Berkshire had amassed shareholder equity worth $57 billion. This is a staggering sum, putting Berkshire well ahead of General Electric, Microsoft, and every other U.S. corporation and ranking it second in the world to Royal Dutch/Shell Group. Buffett could retire tomorrow and be confident of his place in business history not only as stock investor extraordinaire but as a corporate builder of the first rank.
LIMITS OF SCALE. Instead, of course, he is still in there pitching, to borrow one of the baseball metaphors that so delight him. From 1965 through 1998, Berkshire's book value per share rose 24.7% a year on average--trouncing the 12.9% average annual gain in the S&P 500. For some time now, Buffett has warned that the company's sheer bulk will prevent it from matching its breathtaking historical average in the future. His avowed goal is to increase its worth at an average of 15% a year. It's a modest aspiration only by comparison, for it implies adding $58 billion of shareholder equity over the next five years.
Except for the shoe group, Berkshire appears to be in fine fettle. Executive Jet is by no means its only hope for growth. GEICO, Berkshire's largest subsidiary in terms of revenue, has been wresting market share from rivals at an impressive rate and yet still has only 3.5% of the vast U.S. auto-insurance market. Like EJA, Gen Re is planning to expand in Europe and around the world. At the same time, Borsheim's, Scott Fetzer, See's Candies, and other Berkshire companies are experimenting with E-commerce. ''The No. 1 topic Warren and I talk about now is whether retail selling is going to move over to the Internet,'' says Ralph E. Schey, Scott Fetzer's chairman and chief executive.
The pursuit of accelerated growth carries added risk. In 1998, Berkshire had a banner year, posting a 48% increase in net earnings, to $2.8 billion, on revenues of $13.8 billion. But net income dropped 25%, to $541 million in the first quarter, largely because of earnings declines at GEICO and Gen Re. While both insurers were hurt by intensifying price competition, a German subsidiary of Gen Re's also took an embarrassing $275 million pretax loss on a workers' compensation pool. The down quarter did not seem to faze Buffett, who is famous for taking the long view.
If Berkshire were in fact a painting, it would look like a Jackson Pollock: an idiosyncratic product of inspired improvisation. In building his company virtually from scratch over the past quarter-century, Buffett conjured no overarching strategic vision, followed no master plan other than to buy good businesses at the right price. Even when he erred--a rare occurrence--he enfolded his purchases in an embrace intended to be permanent. ''We buy everything, even a stock, with the idea that we will hold it forever,'' he says.
It is hugely important to Buffett that his corporate handiwork outlast him. In fact, it is his hope that Berkshire--his masterpiece in progress--survive him in exactly the form it exists upon his death, like a painting framed and hung on a museum wall. But might there not come a time when his successor might be smart to sell some of Berkshire's weaker units? ''I don't think so,'' Buffett says. ''I hope whoever follows me would behave pretty much as I would if I were to live forever. I feel I owe it. I owe it to the people who sold me their businesses. They didn't have to sell to me. If I die tonight, I want them to get what they were expecting.''
MYSTERY HEIRS. Buffett says he already has picked a successor--two of them, actually: one to manage the stock portfolio, the other to oversee the operating companies. Their identities have not been disclosed to shareholders or, for that matter, to the heirs apparent themselves, because Buffett reserves the right to change his mind. He says he might eventually settle on a single successor.
Munger, who has most of his own billion-dollar net worth in Berkshire stock, professes optimism about the company's post-Buffett prospects. ''The corporate culture of Berkshire is more durable than that of the average corporation. That will go on,'' Munger says. ''The one place a death will hurt us is we're not likely to get as good an allocator of capital as Warren in the next CEO, whoever that is. But it will still be one hell of a business.''
In a company as decentralized as Berkshire Hathaway, the operating businesses need not suffer an immediate loss of momentum from Buffett's passing. On the other hand, it is not clear that a holding company with a grand total of 12 employees can be said to have a corporate culture. Without question, Berkshire's operating chiefs are united in their admiration of Buffett and his principles. But most of them barely know one another, and none is remotely Buffett's equal in terms of breadth of knowledge or personal authority. With its challengingly eccentric mix of businesses and its loose, informal structure, Berkshire Hathaway fits Buffett to a T but might well prove unwieldy for lesser mortals--especially ones constrained by loyalty to Buffett's preservationist credo.
The outlook for Buffett's personal fortune is no less problematic. His wife is his sole heir, but she is 67 years old and might not outlive him. The Buffetts have three children--Susan, 46; Howard, 44; and Peter, 41. Howard and Susan are directors of Berkshire, but none of the Buffett progeny is involved in the management of the company.
FAMILY PLAN. Buffett has said that it is his wish that 99% of the money he has made eventually go to the Buffett Foundation, to be distributed to worthy causes under the direction of Allen Greenberg, 42, the ex-husband of his daughter Susan A. Buffett. Greenberg works out of a one-person office in the same building that houses Berkshire. The foundation was set up in the mid-1960s but operates with a scanty endowment. Currently, it disburses $11 million to $12 million a year, with the bulk of the funds going to groups that provide family-planning services, including abortions. When the foundation comes into its full endowment, it is likely to rank as the world's largest philanthropy.
Buffett is often criticized--privately, to be sure--as a tightwad. But he insists that he is holding tight to his Berkshire stock not out of greed but out of a desire to ensure that control of the company passes to his heirs. ''I think I could control it with as little as 1% of the stock,'' Buffett says. ''With 35%, my wife could carry on, but not with 1%. I'd view it as a tragedy if someone whose achievement was issuing the most junk bonds or having the silliest stock price took over the company and all that we've built evaporated.''
It would indeed be a tragedy in the classical sense if the specialness of Buffett's great gifts contains the seeds of his empire's eventual undoing. For just as no one other than Buffett could have created Berkshire Hathaway, it may well come to pass that no one other than Buffett can make it work.
BY ANTHONY BIANCO |
