Berkshire Beyond Buffett(14)

Corporate culture, a modern concept akin to vague notions like team spirit, is trickier to define than venerable tools of business analysis, such as return on investment. A soft and capacious variable, culture results from multiple inputs, which may conflict with one another. Whether called corporate culture or something else, the manifest recurrence of a discrete number of traits is significant to the identity, performance, and durability of Berkshire as an institution.

Identifying Berkshire culture by examining its subsidiaries does not mean that each subsidiary has every trait or that each trait applies to every subsidiary. It is more like the culture of a good basketball team. Competitive players tend to be fast, strong, and tall. But not every player must have all three traits. A team can succeed with some players who are short but fast and strong and others who are slow yet big and powerful. The player traits taken together add up to a team culture. More than the sum of its parts, team culture also includes norms instilled by coaches, such as sportsmanship and teamwork. Similarly, the Berkshire traits, though not necessarily pervasive in each subsidiary, together create Berkshire culture, with shaping provided from the tone at the top.


Table 3.1

Some Highlights of Part II

Trait Essence Primary Illustration(s)

Budget conscious A penny saved is a nickel earned GEICO (car insurance)

Earnest The value in promise keeping NICO (commercial and catastrophic risks) Gen Re (reinsurance)

Reputation Results benefit from reputation Clayton Homes (customers, investors) Jordan’s Furniture (customers) Benjamin Moore (distributors) Johns Manville (people, environment)

Kinship Wealth can last more than three generations when families value identity and legacy Nebraska Furniture Mart (Blumkin family) RC Willey (Child family) Star Furniture (Wolff family) Helzberg Diamonds Ben Bridge Jeweler

Self-starters To the entrepreneur go the spoils FlightSafety (pilot training) NetJets (fractional aircraft ownership) Garan (Garanimals children’s line) Justin/Acme (branded boots/bricks) Dairy Queen (business franchise)

Hands off Delegate everything but reputation The Pampered Chef (consultants) Scott Fetzer (dealers) Lubrizol (Berkshire saga)

Investor savvy Price is paid, values are exchanged McLane (geographic blanketing) MiTek (bolt-ons and tuck-ins) Lubrizol (turning point) Berkshire Hathaway Energy (capital pipeline)

Rudimentary Impossible dreams are impossible, so stick to your knitting BNSF (old economy, good economics) Shaw Industries (learning from mistakes) Fruit of the Loom (excess leverage)

Eternal Berkshire as a permanent home, a Boys Town for the corporate homeless Brooks (serial corporate owners) Forest River (post-LBO/bankruptcy) Oriental Trading (post-LBO/bankruptcy) CTB (post–private equity) CORT (after multiple LBOs) TTI (avoiding temporary owners)


Business leaders build cultures by promoting or exemplifying given values. Values contribute to decision making, and motivate and attract people who share them; they repel those who don’t.17 Values are also sticky—they are hard to change and tend to endure. The simpler the values are to convey, the more durable they tend to be. The earlier a business leader taps the potential of shared values, the more resilient a corporate culture becomes, offering the leader an enduring legacy. Table 3.1 gives a thumbnail sketch of the cultural traits identified in the stories that follow in Part II. For mnemonic power, the teacher in me found a way to put all the values into an acrostic spelling out B • E • R • K • S • H • I • R • E.





II





4


Budget-conscious and Earnest

1936, San Antonio, Texas. Leo Goodwin, a fifty-year-old insurance manager, was working closely with U.S. military personnel at USAA, an insurer that catered to the military.1 He was concerned that his customers were paying too much for car insurance and calculated that by putting the least risky drivers into an insurance pool and selling policies without agents, a company could discount prices by up to 20 percent and still turn a profit. This simple idea blossomed into GEICO, a car insurance company that is one of the cornerstones of Berkshire’s business, epitomizing the first of the Berkshire values I’ll explore—budget consciousness, in the strict sense of frugality and thrift.

GEICO’s start came when Goodwin persuaded a local banker, Cleaves Rhea, to stake $75,000, which, along with his own $25,000, provided the seed capital to implement his idea.2 For the pool, Goodwin targeted U.S. military officers as well as other federal government employees, perceiving them to be among the least risky drivers. Since such workers are concentrated in the nation’s capital, Goodwin and his wife, Lillian, moved to Washington, D.C., to launch the new company, called the Government Employees Insurance Company—GEICO for short. Toiling twelve-hour days, six days per week, the Goodwins built GEICO with sheer grit. They marketed by direct mail, handled underwriting details, and managed claims. On weekends, Leo Goodwin drove to military bases and made his sales pitch door to door.