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cube00 5 hours ago

Not sure any chairman has their ear to the ground to fully understand the culture within their organization.

I never saw our CEO in person, never saw our chairman even on a webinar.

And yes it's not their job to be that low level, but they can't have an idea of the culture either.

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mgfist 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Berkshire itself has less than 50 employees, so it's absolutely possible to do this.

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ekjhgkejhgk 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Company culture" at Berkshire Hathway doesn't mean the same as at most companies. BH buys companies and don't interfere with them. So while BH employs upwards of 100k people, the people whose culture the CEO cares about is probably under 100 people.

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Nemi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is the answer. While it is very real to talk about "employee culture" as company culture, in this particular case, the "culture" I was talking about was from a corporate/investment/acquisition level. Howards job is not to understand how each company that BRK owns is run, that is the CEO's job. But Howards job is to look at BRK from a high level and make sure that the CEO is executing in the same way that Warren set up, namely – buying companies and stocks at a "fair" price or below, and not micromanaging the companies that they acquire. If the CEO is not living up to that, Howard's (and the board's) one card that they can play is to replace the CEO.

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red-iron-pine 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

sounds like a role that can be replaced by GPT

	▲	GuB-42 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I actually asked GPT that question some time ago. The importance of top executive decisions is overstated, they often do no better than random chance. But their decisions are not where their value lies. The important part is that they own their decisions, or at least appear to do so. And in doing that, they gain trust for the company, they are the company face. It is more of a performance than a technical job. By that, I don't mean it is fake, people will notice if you don't know what you are talking about, and it won't inspire confidence, which is what leaders try to avoid at all costs. LLMs will probably be at least as good at decision making (I mean, that's almost a dice roll), and they can be convincing, which is important too, but they are completely lacking in the trust department. No one want to work for a machine, no one want to do business negotiations with a machine either. That's why it is important to have a human on top.