En 37 ans passés à la tête de la compagnie d?investissements Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett a fait progresser la valeur de cette compagnie de 25% en moyenne par an. Warren Buffett est LA référence des gestionnaires de portefeuilles.

Plusieurs livres lui ont été consacrés. L?ouvrage de James O?Loughlin ?The Real Warren Buffett : Managing Capital, Leading People? (Nicholas Brealey Publishing), disponible sur www.therealwarrenbuffett.com , explique les raisons de cette performance exceptionnelle. Ce livre cite des extraits des Lettres aux Actionnaires, où Warren Buffett explique ses choix stratégiques. Morceaux choisis :

• Choix de vie : ?I really like my life. I arranged my life so that I can do what I want? I tap dance to work, and when I get there, I think I?m supposed to lie on my back and paint the ceiling. ?

• Choix d?attitude : ?Failing conventionally is the route to go. As a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received a bad press.?

• Définition d?une bonne compagnie : ?The difference between a good business and a bad one is that a good business throws up one easy decision after another, whereas a bad one gives you horrible choices ? decisions that are extremely hard to make.?

• Reconnaître son ?cercle de compétences? : ?I?m not a genius. I?m smart in spots ? but I stay around these spots.?

• Stratégies : ?We don?t have a master plan. Charlie (Munger, son associé No.1) and I don?t sit around and strategize or talk about the future of various industries or anything of that sort. It just doesn?t happen? We simply try to survey the whole financial field and look for things that we understand? At Berkshire, our carefully-crafted acquisition strategy is simply to wait for the phone to ring.?

• Risque : ?Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.?

• L?industrie textile : ?I knew it was a tough business? I was either more arrogant or innocent then. We learned a lot of lessons, but I wish we could have learned them somewhere else? The promised benefits from the textiles investments were illusory. Many of our competitors, both domestic and foreign, were stepping up to the same kind of expenditures and, once enough companies did so, their reduced costs became the baseline for reduced prices industrywide.?

• Le secteur des assurances : ?Insurance can be a very good business. It tends to magnify, to an unusual degree, human managerial talent ? or the lack of it.?

• Evaluations : ?Charlie and I see CEOs all the time who, in a sense, don?t know how to think about the value of the business they?re acquiring. Therefore, they go out and hire investment bankers.?

• Conclusion : ?I?ve often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes? my partner, Charles Munger, says all he wants to know is where he?s going to die ? so he won?t ever go there.?

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