Carol J. Loomis - Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012: A Fortune Magazine Book

Tap Dancing
to Work

Tap Dancing
to Work

WARREN BUFFETT

ON PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING, 19662012:

A FORTUNE MAGAZINE BOOK

COLLECTED AND EXPANDED BY

CAROL LOOMIS

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

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First published in 2012 by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright 2012 Time Inc.

All rights reserved

All of the articles (and excerpts from articles) in this book were

published in Fortune magazine in the years 1966 through 2012.

Gates on Buffett (originally titled What I Learned from Warren Buffett) by Bill Gates. Copyright 1995 Microsoft Corp. Originally published by the Harvard Business Review (January/February 1996 issue). Reprinted by permission of Microsoft Corp.

Letters from Chairman Buffett by Andrew Tobias. Originally published in Fortune magazine, issue of August 22, 1983. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tap dancing to work : Warren Buffett on practically everything, 19662012 : a Fortune magazine book / collected and expanded by Carol Loomis.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60150-1

1. Buffett, Warren. 2. Capitalists and financiersUnited States. 3. Investments. I. Loomis, Carol. II. Buffett, Warren III. Fortune.

HG172.B84T37 2012

332.6092dc23

2012036878

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Minion Pro

Designed by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

To my family:
John R.;
Barbara, Tom, John T., and Grayson;
Mark, Steffi, Jenny, and Ben
and
To that often intrusive, but
consistently interesting, part of my
life for nearly fifty-nine years, Fortune.

Because I have long been the chief writer about Warren Buffett at Fortune, which for decades has covered him more closely than any other business publication, I have often been asked whether Im not going to branch out and write a Buffett biography. I have always said no, sure beyond a doubt that a writer who is a good friend of the subject does not make a good biographer. And I have indeed been a close friend of Warrens for more than forty years, a shareholder in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, for almost that long, and the pro bono editor of his annual letter to shareholders for thirty-five. All of those facts can be accommodated in my Fortune articles about Buffett, simply by my informing the reader that they exist. But they are not a firm base for a wide-ranging personal and professional biography, in which there should be considerable distance between writer and subject. Its absence in this case settled the question.

But then it dawned on me that the scores of Buffett articles we have published in Fortune are in themselves a business biographyand a perfect one for a book. Here you have it: Tap Dancing to Work, the description that Buffett has long applied to his love for running Berkshire. This book is a collection, arranged chronologically for the most part, of all our big articles about Warren (plus some shorter, lighter ones like Are Jimmy and Warren Buffett Related?). For each of the big stories Ive written an introduction or commentaryabout forty of them in total. These paragraphs explain, for example, whats particularly important about the story, what Warren forecast that did or didnt come true, what he thinks today about the storys main point. Overall, the books material covers a large chunk of historyforty-six yearsan important span of time not only for Buffett but for the U.S. economy in which he has so successfully operated. (Hmm, forty-six years, Buffett would be inclined to say. Thats a long timealmost one-fifth of the years the U.S. has existed.)

The articles and excerpts in this book were for the most part written by me and about forty other Fortune journalists (including three, John Huey, Rik Kirkland, and Andy Serwer, who rose to managing editor, with John subsequently moving still higher to the post of Time Inc.s editor-in-chief). But the authors also include Buffett himself, who wrote two important stories expressly for us and inserted think-piece sections into his annual letters that we lifted out and made into stories. Also represented is that well-known business writer Bill Gates.

In content as well as authors, this book is enormously diverse. We had the good sense along the way not to repeat ourselves too much, and when we did, I normally edited out the repetition. Actually, not repeating ourselves was pretty easy, because Warren kept doing new things.

When you finish this book, you will have seen the arc of Warrens business life. The first story in which we ever mentioned him was in 1966. He got one sentence then in an investing piece I wrote about another man (Alfred Winslow Jones) and in which I misspelled Buffettgiving it only one t. I will try, however weakly, to pardon myself for that by saying that outside Omaha (where a few investors knew Warren well because he was making them rich) he was in 1966 pretty much unknown. Jump to the early 1980s, and he hadnt gained much ground. When Fortune hired freelancer Andrew Tobias in 1983 to write a piece about Buffetts shareholder letters (see ) and about which he still gets mail.

The middle part of the book, starting with my 1988 profile, The Inside Story of Warren Buffett, describes his adding a second profession, business management, to his old one of investorand next, of course, he made Berkshire Hathaway a huge force in corporate America. Few people recognize the insignificance from which that company has come. In 1965, when Warren took it over, Berkshire was a New England textile manufacturer far too small to have made the