Warren Buffett: Companies Should Stop Wasting Time On Diversity

two dozen men and women work with you Warren at our corporate office I see from last year the quality of the picture has been improved in the annual report so congratulations on that however looking at it there is something that comes to anyone's attention and is the lack of diversity among the staff a 2015 analysis by Calvert Investments found that Coca-Cola was one of the best companies for workplace diversity while Berkshire Hathaway was one of the worst you've explicitly stated that you do not consider diversity when hiring for leadership roles and board members does that need to change are we missing any investment opportunities as a result and do you consider diversity however defined of company leadership and staff when analyzing the value of a company that you may want to purchase well there's a multiple part of course the last answer to the last one is no um what was the one before it you've explicitly stated you do not consider diversity when hiring for leadership roles and board members does that need to change and are we missing any investment opportunities as a result no we we will select board members they and we lay it out and uh and we've done so for years and I think we've been much more explicit uh than most companies uh we are looking for people who are business savvy shareholder oriented and have a special interest in Berkshire and we found people like that and as a result I think I I I think we've got the best board uh that we could have they're not entered they're clearly not in it for the money uh I get called by consoling firms who've been told to get uh candidates for directors for other companies and uh by the questions they ask it's clear they've got some they've got something other than the three questions we ask in terms of of directors in mind uh they really want somebody whose name will reflect credit on the institution which means a big name you know and uh you know one organization recently uh the one that did the blood samples with small Pricks got uh they got some very big names on their board uh and Serranos I think are is that the way you pronounce it Charlie there are no yeah yeah and I mean the names are great but we we're not interested in people that want to be on the board because they want to make a two or three hundred thousand dollars a year you know for ten percent of their time and we're not interested in the ones who for whom it's a Prestige item uh then who want to go and check boxes or that sort of thing so I think we've we've got we will continue to apply that test business savvy shareholder oriented and and uh with a strong uh personal interest in Berkshire and every share the Berkshire that our shareholders own they bought just like everybody else in this room they haven't gotten them on option or they haven't gotten you know I've been on boards where they've given me stock you know they uh I get it for breathing basically uh that half a dozen places that are maybe three or four that I was on the board of uh we want our shareholders to walk in the shoes I mean our directors to walk in the shoes of shareholders we want to care a lot about the business and we want to be smart enough so that they know enough about business that they know what they should get involved in or what they shouldn't get involved in the people in the office uh I'm hoping that when we take the Christmas picture again this year they're exactly the same 25 that were there last year even though we might have added 30 000 employees elsewhere and maybe 10 billion of sales or something like that uh it's a remarkable group of people and they I mean just take this meeting virtually every one of the 25 our CFO my assistant whatever they've been doing job after job connected with making this uh meeting a success and a pleasant a pleasant outing for our shareholders it's it's a Cooperative effort the idea that you would have some Department called annual meeting department and you know you'd have a person in charge of it and she or he would have an assistant and then they would go to various conferences about holding annual meetings and build up you know and then they hire Consultants to come in and help them on the meeting we just don't operate that way and it's a it's a place where everybody helps each other but um part of the what makes part of what makes my job well my job is extraordinarily easy with the people around me really make it easy and part of the reason it's easy is because we don't I we don't have any committees maybe we have some committee I don't know about but I've I've never been invited to any committees I'll put it that way at Berkshire and we don't when we may have a PowerPoint someplace I haven't seen it and I wouldn't know how to use it anyway they we just don't do we don't have make work activities and and we might go to a baseball game together or something like that but it I've seen the other kind of operation and I like ours better I'll put it that way Charlie well years ago I did some work for the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles and my senior partner pompously said you know you don't need to hire us to do this there's some plenty of good Catholic tax lawyers the Archbishop looked at him like he was an idiot and said Mr peeler he says last year I had some very serious surgery and I did not look around for the leading Catholic surgeon that's the way I feel about board members [Applause]

Channel: The Long-Term Investor

Views: 1,491,125

Keywords: personal finance, stock market, stock investing, investing, stock picks, value investing, dividend stocks

Id: 7_GyDptWDqQ

Length: 6min 34sec (394 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2023