Lovely little column over @ the New Yorker

The way Buffett runs his company, Berkshire Hathaway, which owns more than eighty other companies outright, is similarly out of tune with the times. In the current stereotype of corporate acquirers, firms like Bain Capital load companies with debt, downsize their workforces, and strip them of assets. Buffett doesn’t do hostile acquisitions or major restructurings, and he almost never sells the companies he buys. He admits that this isn’t purely rational, although Berkshire is very profitable. But it plays to his strengths (he likes buying companies and building them) and mitigates his weaknesses (as he told me, he hates confrontation). “You’ve got to create the structures consistent with what your temperament needs to be,” he said. Whatever the personal reasons for his approach, it’s one that seems reassuring.

Source: The New Yorker