Brief Biography
Warren Buffett was born in Nebraska in 1930. From the years of his youth, he had exhibited extraordinary business competence. To confirm these words is has to be said that at the age of 26 he had already established Buffett Partnership Ltd; nearly ten years later Warren gained the authority over Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett appeared to be one of the world’s most wealthy men and an acknowledged benefactor due to his supervising of the rapidly growing empire with ownership in the fields of media, generated power, and cooking industries (Zakaria, 2013).
Early Life
The young boy had been actively displaying dexterity towards finances and organizational management, which was confirmed by the friends of the family on countless occasions. Warren was considered to be a mathematical genius due to his exceptional capability to add enormous numbers in his head; a capability that he would later expose in public. The first experience as a financier Warren received when he was 11 years old. He used to attend the stock brokerage shop that belonged to his family and helped to write the current stock costs on the blackboard with a piece of chalk. Later he attempted to make his first money expenditure there: for 114 dollars he had purchased three shares of CSP, which is short for Cities Service Preferred. The price of the stock had quickly decreased to 27 dollars per share; however, Warren patiently waited until they attained 40 dollars per stock. The boy was dissatisfied with the earnings he made; moreover, the price of each share unexpectedly went up to 200 dollars each. Later Warren Buffett would describe this incident as his first life lesson that had shown him the precondition to be patient with investments.
Higher Education and Early Career
When Warren was 16, he had been admitted to the University of Pennsylvania to examine business models and management. However, in less than two years, the future billionaire decided to continue his education at the University of Nebraska. Finally, he finished his higher education at the age of 20, and the income of almost 10 thousand dollars coming from his adolescence, not so little companies. 10 “Influenced by Benjamin Graham’s 1949 book, The Intelligent Investor, Buffett enrolled at Columbia Business School to study under the acclaimed economist and investor. After earning his master ‘s degree in 1951, he sold securities for Buffett-Falk & Company for three years, and then worked for his mentor for two years as an analyst at Graham-Newman Corp” (Warren Buffett biography, 2015, para. 8). At the age of 26, Warren had established the company Buffett Partnership Ltd. in his native town. By using the approaches that he had picked up in Graham’s book Buffet was lucrative in determining the underrated organizations and began his path towards becoming a millionaire (Muenjohn, 2007). Among other companies appraised by Buffet, there was Berkshire Hathaway; Warren began to assemble shares of the company at the beginning of the 1960s, and little over five years later he had gained the authority of the organization.
Business Empire
Within the development of his business, Warren took a tough decision of adjourning his firm Buffett Partnership and aiming his business and organizational efforts towards Berkshire Hathaway. “He phased out its textile manufacturing division, instead expanding the company by buying assets in media (The Washington Post), insurance (GEICO) and oil (Exxon). Immensely successful, the “Oracle of Omaha” even managed to spin seemingly poor investments into gold, most notably with his purchase of scandal-plagued Salomon Brothers in 1987″ (Warren Buffett biography, 2015, para. 8). 15 After making an incredibly fortunate contribution to Coca-Cola, Warren had been appointed as a manager of a company for almost seventeen years.
The HR Leadership Style of the Warren Buffett
The unique combination of various personal traits and features of character allowed Warren Buffett to reach unprecedented heights. A review of these exceptional attributes that were necessary to create a flawless attitude towards money-making will be provided below.
Prudence. Being prudent means that a person can keep the impulses from nourishing into a possible pleasant situation under control. Nowadays, among the expanding devouring and ambition to obtain as much as possible, prudence appears to be uncommon integrity.
Moral sense. As Churchill once said, achievements represent the transition from defeat to defeat without losing the devotion. Having a strong feeling of moral sense allows people to make vital agreements and empower the ability to overcome their failures at the same time. We could say that Warren Buffett was able to reconsider the mistakes he made and avoided them in the future.
Independent thinking. Buffet has a saying about public assessments and that they are not able to replace the actual thoughts of a person. “While a struggle for independent thought is a significant dimension of ordinary life in a shared world where there is a constant pull to adapt, it rockets into a different league entirely when one attempts to do this in an investment environment” (Revealing seven personality traits, 2015, para. 5).
Courage. Within the development of his business, Warren took a tough decision of adjourning his firm Buffett Partnership and aiming his business and organizational efforts towards Berkshire Hathaway (Mehta, 2012). Warren decided to eliminate the textile manufacturing side of the company; alternatively, he started to enlarge the organization by the means of purchasing a property in various fields such as media, security, and oil. As a result of his courage, the small textile company turned into a successful organization that accomplished converting small investments into gold (Warren Buffett biography, 2015). After making an incredibly fortunate contribution to Coca-Cola, Warren had been appointed as a manager of a company for almost seventeen years.
When it comes to business-related traits, I believe that Warren Buffett has all the necessary qualities that would help to develop a business of unprecedented success. These include the passion for his work; emotional intelligence with such components as self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness; flexibility and adaptability towards new policies of the business; the internal position of control within the organization, and courage for finding the undervalued companies and reestablishing them for the public.
Warren Buffett has always claimed that only the people who are well aware of the consequences of their actions can take a chance and risk everything. On the contrary, the best approach towards business is to evaluate every possible outcome of the arrangement, take it slow, and, therefore, diminish the uncertainties and risks. Moreover, Buffett claims that his motto determines that it takes twenty years to develop a good prominence and only a few moments to destroy it. For this reason, he had always chosen a second path for his business decisions (Wright, 2014).
Moreover, Warren Buffett as an efficient HR leader has several motives for business. These are leadership motives, power motives, resilience motives, and achievement motives. All approaches towards conducting a business of Warren Buffett were mentioned above while speaking about his life and starting a business career.
References
Mehta, R. (2012). The Emotionally Intelligent Investor: How self-awareness, empathy, and intuition drive performance. Poitiers, France: LES Publishing.
Revealing seven personality traits that have made Warren Buffett a cheerful billionaire. (2015). Web.
Warren Buffett biography. (2015). Web.
Wright, T. (2014). 7 things Warren Buffett can teach you about leadership. Web.
Zakaria, N. (2013). Creating cross-culturally competent leaders for global teams. Interdisciplinary Research, 3(2), 19-33.