"Why I Fire People Every Day" - Warren Buffett

you obviously have filters that you apply on selecting people as you do on stocks can you tell us a little bit about what those filters are that is a key key question because when we buy businesses we don't have managers to put in them i mean we're not buying them that way we don't have a lot of mdas around the office uh that would thank god yeah that i you know i have not promised that they're going to have all kinds of opportunities and so as a practical matter we need management with the businesses that we buy and three times out of four thereabouts the manager is the owner and is receiving tens of millions maybe hundreds of millions of dollars so they're not they don't have to work and we have to decide in that time when we meet them whether they love the business or love money and we're not making a moral judgment charlie may but i i'm not making a moral judgment about whether it's better to love the business or love money but it's very important for me to know which which of the two is the primary motivator with them and we have had extremely good luck in identifying people who love their business so all all we have to do is avoid anything that on our part that diminishes that love of the business or makes other conditions so intolerable that they overcome that love of the business and we have all we have a number of people working for us that have no financial need to work at all and they probably outwork you know 95 or more of the people in the world and they do it because they just they love smacking the ball and we almost we virtually had no mistakes in that respect and we have identified a number of people charlie and i have in terms of proposals to us where we felt that they did really they liked the money better than the business they were kind of tired of the business you know and and they might promise us that they would continue on and they would do it in good faith but something would happen six months later a year later and they'd say to themselves why am i doing this you know for berkshire hathaway when i got when i could be doing whatever else they want to do i can't tell you exactly how we what filter it is that we that we put them through mentally but i i can tell you that if you've been around a while you can i think you can have a pretty high batting average in in in coming to those conclusions as you can about other aspects of human behavior i'm not saying you can take 100 people and take a look at them and analyze their personalities or anything of the sort but i think when you see the extreme cases the ones that are going to cause you nothing but trouble or the ones that are going to bring you nothing but but joy i think you can identify those pretty well charlie well yeah i think it's pretty simple you've got integrity uh intelligence and experience and dedication and that's what human enterprises need to run well and we've been very lucky in in getting this marvelous group of associates to work with all these years but we filter out a lot of people and then they say well how do you filter them out i would say and i think charlie agree with this people give themselves away fairly often and maybe it does help to have been around as long as we have in seeing the various ways they give give themselves away they when somebody comes to me with a business then i probably shouldn't tell this publicly because they'll probably tailor their approach subsequently but when when they come just the very things they talk about what they regard as important and not important there are a lot of clues that come as the subsequent behavior and like i say we've we've really had a batting outrage i wouldn't have thought we would have had in the people that we've joined with but it hasn't been a hundred percent it's been well above 90 and i i get asked that you know i mean how they how do you make those judgments and i don't know charlie can you articulate the way we do it well partly we're deeply suspicious when the proposition is too good to be true

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Keywords: freenvesting, investing, stocks, stock market, stock market investing, how to outperform the stock market, berkshire hathaway annual meeting, warren buffett annual meeting, warren buffett, warren buffett motivation, warren buffett speech, warren buffett with subtitles, investing basics, warren buffett investment strategy, warren buffett interview, warren buffett advice, warren buffett trust, warren buffett integrity, people you can trust, buffett, why i fire people every day

Id: bHB8NLY-870

Length: 4min 23sec (263 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021