Juxtaposition

Triaging between Berkshire Hathaway and Small Giants

As a lesson in cognitive dissonance, I would be hard-pressed to find two more diverse universes than the Small Giants Summit, held annually in Detroit in the first week of May with some 200 attendees, and the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. AGM which attracted over 40,000 shareholders to the convention center in Omaha Nebraska last weekend and which has been fervently dissected and commented on by BRK aficionados over the past few days (the best one is here on Substack and written by Rational Walk) . I watched the 5 hour Q&A with Warren, Charlie, and their articulate henchman and successors, Greg Abel (Vice Chair and CEO in-waiting) and Ajit Jain, Head of Insurance with great interest, finding their responses to the barrage of questions (some 45 altogether) illuminating for the insights they gave into the minds running what I suspect is the purest capitalist enterprise on the planet.

The Small Giants annual summit, on the other hand, is about as far removed from the behemoth that is Berkshire Hathaway as could be imagined - representatives of perhaps one hundred companies (roughly as many as make up the BRK portfolio) coming together for two days of intense celebration of a particular way of doing business at human scale, rather than capital scale and celebrating intimacy and cultural integrity over size or market dominance. We listened to presentations from owners of businesses who have struggled to find their identities as creators and entrepreneurs, often with no real background in business and driven by an irresistible urge to create something special around whatever product or service they ended up dedicating their lives to - handbags and fashion items produced by Mexican artisanal craftsmen in the case of Conni Reed’s Consuela or core banking software and systems technology in the case of reluctant CEO and mother of a severely handicapped daughter, Elizabeth Glasbrenner, whose Smiley Technologies has flourished under her leadership despite having next to no technical software competence when she took over the job 8 years ago.

The Small Giants celebrate intimacy in their business relationships, eschewing growth if it means sacrificing the cultural integrity of the organisations they have fought hard to build and sustain, but very often (mostly actually) finding a way to do both - grow and remain fully aligned with the atmosphere of intimacy that gives their lives meaning far beyond the P&L. The stories that are most celebrated at the Small Giants are those that illustrate both healthy growth and profitability as well as intentional human scale culture, in which relationships and the development of individual and collective potential are paramount.

There was a spontaneous round of applause for Elizabeth Glasbrenner when she revealed how, after being forced into the CEO role on the sudden departure of her high IQ, low EQ elder brother from that role in 2016 with parting words along the lines of “you’re never going to be able to run this business”, she and her team had 7x-ed the revenue and 10x-ed the profitability of the business in the intervening eight years. Her comment that her role had always been to support other people in being successful and that as a result, she felt more comfortable in the second row resonated with many, in particular, I felt the women entrepreneurs in the room. However, she went on to say, that after a few weeks on the job that she never wanted, she realised that helping people succeed was exactly what the role of CEO entailed and that once she had reframed the paradigm of her new job, she embraced it wholeheartedly. Helping her people succeed has resulted in phenomenal growth and business success for Smiley under her tenure. Whodda thunk it?