2015: Do Berkshire's formerly-public subsidiaries think long term?

JONATHAN BRANDT: Warren, you have told the managers of your businesses to think of their businesses as something they will own forever and that their first priority should be to widen the moat and take care of their customers.

In more than one case, according to people I’ve spoken to, Berkshire’s subsidiaries that were formally publicly traded have run into trouble by — now this is on the margin, mind you — trying to maximize calendar year earnings and dividends to the parent, as opposed to focusing on the long-term health of the business.

Do you find that managements of formally public companies, through force of habit, perhaps, have more trouble making decisions with only minimal concern for short-term results than would be the case for formally private companies?

If this dynamic is a real one, is there something more that can be done to combat it?

And I’m curious, are most of Berkshire’s compensation structures based on 12-month results or are they already based over multiyear periods?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. I don’t think we’ve had any particular problem with public companies versus private companies that we’ve bought.

I mean, if you took the aggregate of the public companies we bought and matched them up against the private companies, I don’t know which group I would rather own or which has delivered the greater returns.

CHARLIE MUNGER: I don’t know where he gets the idea.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.

CHARLIE MUNGER: It’s not apparent to us.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Well, you’ve heard Charlie. And I can’t think of it myself.

And, you know, if we tell them to think about 100 years, we mean think about 100 years, and I think they know we mean it. They certainly know we run Berkshire, you know, in terms of our own decisions that way.

So, I think we set the right example, and I think we use the words to convey that belief as strongly as we can, and we try to reinforce — we try to put it in the annual report, we try to talk about it in meetings like this.

We believe in sort of hammering the same message out there over and over again.

Now, we don’t ignore yearly results at all, it’s just we don’t live by them. But I get figures every month on virtually every business, and I read them with great interest, and, you know, I’m thinking about them all the time.

I don’t think they’re unimportant, but we don’t live by them. And I think what really counts, you know, is where we’re going to be three years, five years, or 10 years from now.

But I also — I wouldn’t — if we’re subpar in some area, I wouldn’t accept the fact that we’re working to maximize things in 10 years mean that we should be throwing away money, or anything like that, in the short run, or not paying attention to the business.

But I’d have to say what Charlie has, I don’t really agree with the premi