The Buffett Letters, Part I: Introduction
By Robert Walker Cohen
Warren Buffett does more than move markets with his capital. He moves them with his words.
When Buffett has something to say, the world’s market movers do more than listen. They take note and they take action.
Markets may move. Valuations may change. Fortunes may rise or fall.
Today’s blog is the first of a series examining Buffett’s communication strategies and tactics, leveraging the vehicle of his essays and thought leadership. Buffett’s famous — and famously anticipated — annual shareholder letters have been nothing less than the beating heart of his communication strategy, and will be central to this series.
Buffett’s annual letters are more than thought leadership. They are industry leadership. They are often considered market and even macroeconomic bellwethers.
For those of us in the field, they serve as a kind of “gold standard” as to what the best thought leadership and executive communications can accomplish.
Buffett’s impact, longevity, and consistency make him a contender for one of the greatest corporate communicators of all time. While his investing record (alongside his inextricable partner, Charlie Munger) is undisputed, there is equally much to learn from how he manages thought leadership, investor relations, and public perception.
From a branding and messaging perspective, he has ingeniously incorporated his communication strategy into his investing strategy such that they are mutually supportive and holistically intertwined.
At times, it can be hard to tell where the communication strategy ends and the investing strategy begins. This is part of its genius. It feels natural, authentic, and trustworthy. In a highly complex industry, which most do not understand at best or are highly suspicious of at worst, Buffett appears to exemplify honesty, sincerity, and conscientiousness.
His persona and brand identity are conscious, intentional, and have been refined over the decades, and crucially, appear nearly interchangeable with his results and his product, as he once remarked —
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
To extract the best lessons from decades of his writing, we have to look at his work holistically. There is an equal amount to learn from Charlie Munger, of course — and much from the broader Berkshire Hathaway ecosystem supporting Buffett and Munger — but I believe Munger and Berkshire deserve their own separate analyses and I plan to do so in time.
In terms of how I plan to approach this series, my primary source will be “The Essays of Warren Buffett,” an arrangement of Buffett’s best essays that have been curated by Lawrence Cunningham.
Buffett himself has remarked of the collection —
“The best book representing our views. If I were to pick one book to read, this would be the one.”
Cunningham’s arrangement organizes Buffett’s writings by subject rather than chronology so as to convey the most essential components of Buffett’s approach and to be organized for readers to peruse the topics they are most interested in learning about. For my purposes, this is both convenient and functional as it provides a great field guide to the vast Buffett corpus and allows the readers that join me on this journey to examine Buffett’s communication strategy, style, and tactics across a diverse range of critical subjects in finance and corporate life.
While Cunningham’s arrangement will be my primary source, I may also choose to review and analyze certain shareholder letters or other essays that are especially relevant for the purposes of this series.
The next post in this series will cover a lesser-known short essay of Buffett’s concerning the art of writing, published as the preface to “A Plain English Handbook,” the SEC’s writing manual. Stay tuned.
