Coming Sunday in The Sun: Warren Buffet
Sunday, on The Baltimore Sun's book page, Glenn C. Altschuler reviews Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life. Here's an excerpt from the review: With unprecedented access to Buffett, his family and his friends, Alice Schroeder, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, has produced an engaging and engrossing profile of an extraordinarily complex man.
The Snowball is, at times, excessively detailed and repetitive. It’s fun to know that Buffett’s diet consists almost exclusively of burgers, fries, Coke and chocolate. But Schroeder might have spared us the details of the repasts he refused, picked at or pushed aside. ...
In his family life, Schroeder writes, Buffett was often insensitive and self-absorbed. After gossip columnists reported that Katharine Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post, had tossed her house keys to the billionaire at a charity event, his wife, Susan Thompson Buffett, moved to San Francisco. For more than 25 years, Buffett lived in Omaha, Neb., with Astrid Menks, all the while maintaining that Thompson Buffett remained the love of his life. ...
When she died, “his chest burned and his heart exploded.” Schroeder believes he learned his lesson: “The more you give love away, the more you get.” ...
Schroeder is in awe of Buffett the businessman. He made mistakes, of course, pumping money into Berkshire Hathaway, a moribund textile mill, for 20 years, and failing to buy Wal-Mart. But his brilliant investments — in GEICO, American Express, See’s Candies, the Nebraska Furniture Mart and Coca-Cola — enabled him, decade after decade, to stay light years ahead of just about every other stock picker. ...
Buffett’s method never varied: “Estimate an investment’s intrinsic value, handicap its risk, buy using margin of safety, concentrate, stay in the circle of competence, let it roll as compounding did the work.” Executing these simple ideas, of course, is more difficult than understanding them. It’s an art.
Collecting information and manipulating numbers is essential. Buffett believes, however, that “focus” matters the most. In “living that word,” he aspires to — and sometimes reaches — intensity, independence, discipline, passionate perfectionism and single-minded obsession. Schroeder is probably mistaken in claiming that “pure love” turned Buffett into a “learning machine.”
But it’s inspiring, isn’t it, to watch him consult his “Inner Scorecard” — and give millions of people dealt a losing hand in life a chance to survive and thrive.
