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atmosphere was such that it didn’t lend itself to questioning. You just had a feeling when it got to be noon that it would not be at all polite to keep raising subjects or talking about things that would cause the meeting to last until one o’clock. He was just not a guy you questioned. Some people have that bearing about them, and when the bearing is backed up by a very good record, the combination of the two is pretty overpowering.” Buffett was more than simply nonconfrontational; he was of an age and from an era that viewed serving on boards as a quasisocial activity in which deference and politeness held sway. In 1998, that was the boardroom culture throughout America. This culture reflected the reality that the structure of corporate boards gave directors very little leeway with management.

“As a director, you can’t remotely tell management what to do. All this stuff you read in the press about the board setting strategy is baloney. As a board member, you can do practically nothing. If a CEO thinks a director is smart and on his side, he’ll listen to some degree, but ninety-eight percent of the time, he’ll do what he wants to anyway. Listen, that’s the way I run Berkshire. I think Roberto liked me, but he was not looking for a lot of ideas from me.”

Buffett never knew of anything seriously enough awry at Coca-Cola to make him consider the drastic step of resigning from the board. Howie had a different problem: standing up to pressure from Coca-Cola.

“I was more independent than just about anybody else on that board, because I was on the Berkshire board, and no one at Coca-Cola could intimidate me,” says Howie. “So I had no problem challenging Coca-Cola on behalf of CCE.” But Howie eventually got off the CCE board. There was just too much potential for conflict between the two boards. In the sense that people learn more from heavy seas than smooth sailing, if Keough had meant to send Howie to another crash course in business school, the CCE role was a success. Howie’s radar for danger signs in business had sharpened considerably. Even though he continued to serve on boards, the experience taught him that he wanted to fulfill his thirst for excitement outside the corporate world.

By the mid-1990s, Goizueta and his finance chief, Doug Ivester, were dosing Coke with even larger amounts of bottler profits to maintain the illusion of the company’s rapid earnings flow. Then in 1997, Goizueta died unexpectedly, only a few months after announcing he had lung cancer. The board and the company and investors were shocked. He had been a statesmanlike CEO, credited with making Coca-Cola an international giant, his persona so titanic that it was hard to imagine who could fill his shoes. The board had deferred to Goizueta so absolutely that nobody ever seemed to have thought of any alternative to his handpicked successor, the burly, table-pounding Ivester.7 The finance chief had a big reputation: He had engineered much of the company’s recent success, carving up the financial interests of Coca-Cola and its bottlers to squeeze out every last advantage in Coca-Cola’s favor. Goizueta was the aristocratic leader, Ivester the hands-on “doer.” He loved technology, and hummed along with the Silicon Valley gestalt of the times.

Buffett liked Ivester and wanted him to succeed. A textile-factory mechanic’s son who had risen through sheer determination, Ivester was an analytical numbers guy.8 And, of course, under Goizueta he had enriched Buffett enormously. He had that underdog grit that Buffett liked. Moreover, Buffett laid responsibility for the accounting gimmickry at Goizueta’s door, not Ivester’s.

Juicing the earnings had certainly worked. Coca-Cola was trading at $70 per share. BRK itself was rocking with the market. Priced at $48,000 in June 1997, it flew to $67,000 over the next nine months. The higher the market went, the tougher it got for Buffett to invest, and yet the higher BRK rose. It made no sense, except that the stocks that Berkshire owned were rising with the market. As 1998 progressed, the Dow crossed 9,000 and was on