I’ve just started reading ‘The Snowball’ the biography of Warren Buffett, ‘Oracle of Omaha’, written by Alice Schroeder. It’s difficult not to warm to a man who has such a down to earth approach to business and life. Who has an overwhelming desire to keep proving himself and who has a deep reverence for his father whom he felt the world had treated unjustly.

At a time when most of us are worrying about the future, it is interesting to read about a man who has amassed a fortune that is reputed to be in the region of $30 billion. Well early on in the book there is a key message for everyone involved in business. Business is essentially simple. It’s about making things and doing services. Once it starts to get complex then it probably won’t work and will all end in tears. As that other successful straight talker, Jon Moulton, the managing partner of Alchemy, said of the recent bank melt downs: “It would be amusing to hear some banks’ Boards explain a CLO Squared or, more simply, how they allowed their balance sheets to be filled with products they did not understand and their auditors cannot value”. *

So what is a normal day like for Buffett? Well, he first reads his favourite stock market writers then he gets down to his daily business intelligence. He gets the figures from the extending list of companies that Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s investment vehicle, owns. . As Schroeder puts it he gets the numbers on:

“How many auto policies GEICO had sold last week and how many claims it had paid; how many pounds of See’s Candies had sold yesterday; how many prison-guard uniforms had been ordered from Fechheimers; how many jet time-shares NetJets was selling in Europe and the United States; and all the rest – awnings, battery chargers, kilowatt hours, air compressors, engagement rings, leased trucks, encyclopedias, pilot training, home furnishings, cardiopulmonary equipment, pig stalls, boat loans, real estate listings, ice cream sundaes, winches and windlasses, cubic feet of gas, sump pumps, vacuum cleaners, newspaper advertising, egg counters, knives, furniture rentals, nurses’ shoes, electromechanical components. All the numbers on their costs and sales poured into his office, and he knew many of them from memory.” **

Well, he is a very successful man. What sort of handle do you have on your business, on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis? It is interesting that such a man would choose so many tangible things to gauge what is going on in his businesses that he has invested in. He is not waiting for the monthly balance sheet and profit and loss nor is he running some complex mathematical model understandable only to a few initiates. No, he is looking at the daily things happening in the real world that he knows will eventually filter through into real results.

He has set the bar very high. But what Warren Buffett does we can also do. We have everything to hand in our organisations.  We just have to ask ourselves, can we have the discipline to do it?

* Moulton, Jon. October 8^th 2008. Financial Crisis:UK bail out is too little, too late. Retrieved 5^th November from Telegraph.co.uk. Web site

** Schroeder, Alice. 2008. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. P28.London:Bloomsbury. My emphasis