Buffet and Munger: two of my favourite capitalists....
“By the standards of the rest of the world, we overtrust. So far it has worked very well for us. Some would see it as weakness.”
That was Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathawayand Warren Buffett’s best friend, speaking during the weekend at the company’s annual meeting, known as “Woodstock for Capitalists.”
Mr. Munger, 90, was ruminating on the state of corporate governance, offering a counternarrative to the distrustful culture of most businesses: Instead of filling your ranks with lawyers and compliance people, he argued, hire people that you actually trust and let them do their job.
Here’s a little-known fact: Berkshire Hathaway, the fifth-largest company in the United States, with some $162.5 billion in revenue and 300,000 employees worldwide, has no general counsel that oversees the holding company’s dozens of units. There is no human resources department, either.
