The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [260]
“It showed everybody, all audiences, I was serious about this,” recalls Byrne. “And that I was going to fight for the life of this company no matter what, including walking out of a state, which wasn’t done back then.” Byrne’s impalement of New Jersey had exactly that effect. Everybody knew he was serious.
“It was like he had trained all his life for that position. It was like he’d been genetically designed for that particular period of time. If you’d searched the country, you could not have found a better battlefield commander. He had to assemble a team of people, he had to chop thousands of heads, and he had to change the thinking of those heads that stayed around. It was a Herculean job. Nobody could have done it better than Jack. He was a tough, disciplined thinker about pricing and reserves and he demanded rational business principles and actions. Everybody knew exactly what GEICO was all about, and he worked extraordinary hours focused on a single objective. He was always interested in what made sense rather than what had been done in the past.”
Byrne walked through GEICO’s door each morning, sailed his hat fifty feet up to the upper floor of the atrium, and hollered hello to the secretaries.67 “If I don’t whistle by the graveyard, who is going to?” he asked. “If I don’t dance, who’s going to dance?” He had a way of making people feel tah-riffic about the place where they went to work every morning, despite the career-threatening status of their employer. He chopped forty percent of the company’s customers, sold half of its profitable life-insurance affiliate to raise cash, and withdrew from all but seven states plus the District of Columbia. Byrne seemed to run on rocket fuel. He called his executives into meetings at the Sheraton and Westin hotels near Dulles Airport and questioned them for fifteen hours at a stretch, sometimes for days at a time.68 He interrupted GEICO’s human-resources manager at the podium during a meeting by saying, “You’re out,” and named his successor from the audience that very moment. His attitude was: “You’re not running a public library here, you’re trying to save a company.”69
“Jack was unmerciful on me,” says Tony Nicely, who had worked for GEICO since he was eighteen years old. “He liked picking on young, aggressive people. But he taught me a lot and I will always be indebted to him. He taught me to think of the business as a whole, not separate functions like underwriting or investing. I learned the importance of a disciplined balance sheet.”
Byrne told his workers if they couldn’t meet a certain sales figure, they would have to hoist his 240 pounds on their shoulders into a sedan chair like a Roman emperor and bear him into company meetings for a year.70 They made the numbers. Wearing a huge chef’s hat and a giant shamrock, “I cooked Irish dinners for them,” he says. “Colcannon, which is turnips and potatoes and sour milk. It tastes terrible. I’d have these big kettles, and I’d pound these turnips, saying, ‘Oh, this is going to be wonderful!’”
Buffett grabbed Byrne and his wife, Dorothy, and immediately pulled them into his circle of friends. Now, between GEICO, Washington Post meetings, Pinkerton’s board meetings, West Coast trips for Blue Chip and Wesco, business trips to New York, board meetings for Munsingwear, a board that he had joined in 1974, and Kay Parties, he was traveling much of the time. Buffett decided that he needed help in the office. Pushed by Big Susie,