The Strategist
The long view, patient, analytical, playing several moves ahead.
Charlie Munger reads as The Strategist because his intellectual life was organised around one aim, deciding better than almost anyone alive. His lattice of mental models, drawn from psychology, physics, economics, and biology, was never academic ornament. At Berkshire Hathaway it functioned as a precision instrument, stress-testing Buffett's theses through inversion and second-order reasoning.
“But everybody had big capital equipment. If they didn't use it, they obviously were losing a lot of money. So that everybody was almost forced into a very destructive competition by the logic of the individual situations. There are a lot of businesses that are very hard to make money in permanently.”
“We've actually started a business or two, and we bought some little ones that we made big, so we have done some things that look like venture capital, and some of them have been quite successful. But averaged out, we bought existing businesses that had a lot of momentum as well as a lot of talent. I just wrote those things.”
“Well, it could have evolved. There are private places that make a lot of money, and let's stay private. But I think both Warren and I have actually enjoyed as much of the public life as we have in terms of the annual meetings and the poor Charlie's Almanac stuff. And Bobbitt gives all these seminar talks and so forth.”
“Of course, I revised it. Of course, I knew him personally. And he was a cocky conductor's son with a PhD in engineering, thermodynamics. And he was terribly competitive. He wanted to win. He'd been an athlete. He was almost a scratch golfer.”
Wikiquote: “Public record read”
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