What Greg Abel will do now he has officially taken over from Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway.
- In today’s CEO Daily: Shawn Tully on what Greg Abel will do now he has officially taken over from Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway.
- The big story: U.S. and China agree to slash trade tariffs.
- The markets: Everything is up!
- Analyst notes from Wedbush on the China trade deal, Macquarie on the declining dollar, Oxford Economics on the U.K.-U.S. trade deal.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. He has arguably the toughest act in Corporate America—following Warren Buffett. But now that Greg Abel officially has a timetable to take over Berkshire Hathaway by year-end, the question is: How will he run it? I profiled Abel for Fortune back in January—you can read the in-depth story here. But three themes emerged when I examined where Abel may copy from Buffett’s playbook—and where he will likely go his own way.
Both leaders love a bargain and abhor unnecessary risk: Abel shares with Buffett a sorcerous talent for dealmaking. The future CEO is especially adept at grabbing great assets at distressed prices in rough markets. Notable examples are BHE’s purchases of pipeline and natural gas giants for a song in the early 2000s, after buyers intoxicated by deregulation such as Enron and Williams Companies vastly overpaid for them. The difference: Abel did the sweat-the-details stewardship that made the businesses better. Buffett famously didn’t get much into operations, relying instead on his one-of-a-kind knack for picking crack operators. Like Buffett, Abel is an accounting whiz. Going forward, Abel is most likely to continue Buffett’s practice of spreading acquisitions and investments across diverse industries so that through the cycle, winners in rising markets offset the laggards in temporarily falling sectors, and he would never bet the franchise on the purchase of a single gigantic business.
Expect Abel to be more hands-on than Buffett: The best wager is that Abel will impose tougher operating goals on the businesses, then help diplomatically steer their CEOs toward the best route for getting there. Jim Weber, former head of Brooks, disclosed that Abel visited the running-shoe maker’s Seattle headquarters several times a year for strategy sessions. “If you’re not performing, he’ll tell you, and you have a few months to get on track,” Weber said during an interview at the 2021 annual meeting. Abel is also taking a closer look at how much the subs are spending on new plants and other capex. Says Adam Mead, who wrote the definitive book on Berkshire’s financial history, “a couple of the CEOs told me that he’s imposed a kind of advisory cap on capital spending. Go over the limit and it triggers a conversation with Greg.”
Abel may push for more synergies: Berkshire prides itself on harboring an extremely light, flat corporate structure that minimizes bureaucracy and speeds decision-making. But maybe the looseness has gone too far. Successful conglomerates from Danaher to Honeywell attain efficiencies by pooling the buying power of diverse businesses to purchase raw materials and components at the best prices. Today, Berkshire does garner synergies, and they’re big—but mainly financial. Headquarters can lend to Clayton homes and other subs at rates far lower than they’d pay to banks or bondholders, for example. But Berkshire apparently does little or nothing along the lines of encouraging its subs to buy steel or semiconductors in concert, or cross-selling Geico insurance. At the annual meeting, Abel cited that Geico is going through a “technological transformation,” and that other Berkshire businesses could learn from its experience and perhaps adopt similar improvements. Berkshire needs to “figure out how to benefit from prior improvements,” he concluded.
More news below.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com