“Charlie made a very good point there about how managers would do better if they understood investments. I find it absolutely fascinating, and I’ve seen this throughout my life, I’ve seen it close up. I will have friends who are CEOs of companies and they’ll have somebody else handle their money. If you say to them, you know, should you buy Coca-Cola or Gillette or something like that, they’ll say that’s much too tough. I don’t understand that sort of thing. What do I know about investing? And then some investment banker walks in the next day with the idea they buy a $3 billion company, which is just buying a lot of shares of stock in one company, and they’ll run through some little two-hour presentation and turn it over to a strategic planning group and think that they are then the ones that should make that decision as to whether to buy multibillion-dollar businesses when they really don’t feel they’re qualified to make $10,000 decisions with their own money. And it’s extraordinary what you see in corporate America and the acquisition activity. It’s a little like they say about making sausage and making laws, it’s better unobserved.”
—Warren Buffett.
