The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [1]
Commandment Two: Be Inflexible
Commandment Three: Isolate Yourself
Commandment Four: Assume Infallibility
Commandment Five: Play the Game Close to the Foul Line
Commandment Six: Don’t Take Time to Think
Commandment Seven: Put All Your Faith in Experts and Outside Consultants
Commandment Eight: Love Your Bureaucracy
Commandment Nine: Send Mixed Messages
Commandment Ten: Be Afraid of the Future
Commandment Eleven: Lose Your Passion for Work—for Life
Acknowledgments
Foreword
IT HAS BEEN AN ARTICLE of faith for me that I should always try to hang out with people who are better than I. There is no question that by doing so you move yourself up. It worked for me in marriage and it’s worked for me with Don Keough.
When I’m with Don Keough, I can feel myself on the up escalator. He has an optimistic view of me and what I am to the extent that he raises my sights and makes me believe more in myself and the world around me. When you are around Don, you are learning something all the time. He’s an incredible business leader. The greatest achievement of good executives is to get things done through other people, not themselves. Now here is a guy who is capable of getting all kinds of people from all over the world, men and women who want to help him succeed. I’ve seen him do it.
Maybe it is because no one understands the human aspects of situations better than he. He can advise my kids perhaps better than I can and they love him for that. He does the same for everyone he calls a friend—and that is a lot of people.
The Graham Group, named after my mentor Ben Graham, is a bunch of people who meet every two years or so. All my close friends, including Don, attend. Everyone wants Don to be the keynote speaker. Bill Gates, in particular, always wants it to be Don Keough. He just loves listening to him because Don talks such sense and offers such inspiration. Don can tell you to go to hell so wonderfully you’ll enjoy the journey.
He is on my board at Berkshire Hathaway because he is one of the very few guys I feel I can hand the keys over to.
We go back almost fifty years together, to the time we lived opposite each other on Farnam Street here in Omaha. We were just two guys making a living for our families back then. If we had told you that one of us would become president of The Coca-Cola Company and the other would become head of Berkshire Hathaway, I’m sure you would have said I hope their parents have enough money to support these two.
At one point I knocked on his door and asked him to invest ten thousand dollars or so with me. He turned me down flat. I’d probably have turned me down too back then.
Our families were great friends; the kids were always in and out of each other’s houses. It was very tough on my kids when they had to move to Houston. There were a lot of tears that day when they moved away.
It’s interesting when you think of it. Don and I were living less than a hundred yards away from where my future partner, Charlie Munger, had grown up. Don went to Houston and Atlanta; Charlie landed in Los Angeles. But we later reunited as close friends and business associates, all with a lot of Omaha still in us. Nowadays, of course, a lot of people say they are from Omaha for status reasons!
After Don left Omaha we kept in touch over the years. I’d meet him at the Alfalfa Club or once we even met at the White House. Then he read an article in 1984 in which I praised Pepsi, “preferably with a touch of cherry syrup in it.” The next day he sent me their new product, Cherry Coke, and invited me to taste test “the nectar of the Gods.” After I drank it I told him, “Forget about your testing. I don’t know much about that stuff but I do know this is a winner.”
I switched brands right away and immediately declared Cherry Coke the official soft drink of Berkshire Hathaway.
A few years later I started buying Coke stock but I didn’t tell Don because I felt he might have to tell the company lawyer, and who knows where that would have led. I didn’t want to put him in an awkward position. Anyway, he called