I got the impression Charlie felt that the Iscar acquisition was pretty strong proof that he and Buffett have been successful in creating at Berkshire a culture that will be still going strong long after he and Warren had left the building. He said further that "We don’t train executives here we find them." Actually it might have been more accurate for him to say "We don’t train executives here we let them find us."

To Charlie it is "Perfectly obvious but very little understood", that to companies being acquired Berkshire’s biggest moat is its culture. In the future the company’s earnings and market value will have very little to do with stock picking; and everything to do with the standards that have been set by Charlie and Warren. Warren says that he uses the Chairman’s letter and the Annual Meeting to define the company’s culture.

The thing that has always fascinated me about Buffett is not the money but the money, and the character. He is proof that you do not have to be poor to be virtuous. Not everyone will buy his culture, but at glance at a list of Berkshire’s acquisitions shows that the number of managers that "get it" is growing. Berkshire’s culture is about honesty, dedication, and steady durable growth. The word is getting around that this is not the worst of all worlds.

This is not everyone’s idea of paradise, no stock options no $800 million pay packages. But the managers that come do not have to be sold on Berkshire’s management style they have pre-selected themselves in by calling Omaha. They call because they recognize the culture, and they know that it works, in most cases it is their culture already. They do not need to be trained because they already understand. No one is a better symbol of the culture than Mrs. B the immigrant who came here poor, became rich but was still working 70 hour weeks in her 102^nd year.

Charlie is convinced that he and Warren have created a business that will thrive without them because there will always be people like Eitan Wertheimer who will sell to Berkshire or to no one. They will sell to Berkshire because they are attracted to the culture. Berkshire is about rewarding the right kind of behavior. It is about building moats, about promising only what you can deliver, about knowing limits of your competency and respecting the people you work with. It is about tap dancing to work every day.

For the manager there is the knowledge that he will get the financial support he needs without the strings attached by Wall Street, no pressure from quarterly earnings that turn out lumpy, no 10 Q that exposes his company’s financial information to his competitors.

Iscar is different because they are not coming to Berkshire to preserve what they have. They are coming to Berkshire because they think the culture will help them grow, to expand their moats and protect them from the cannibals on Wall Street.

It is all perfectly obvious.

The List

Also at the meeting Charlie said that if you look at list of what they have acquired in the last ten years you will be surprised. So I decided to make a list. This is not a perfect list. It is just the best that I could piece together from my annual reports. You will see a lot estimates about prices. These estimates are based on what I remember and what I could guess from the Cash flow Statements.

The Total for cash deals through 2005 is about $17 Billion and the total of $24 billion in stock deals is, of course, mostly GenRe. The Total for noninsurance deals is about $17 billion and Operating profit for this segment has grown from $200 million to $4 billion so the return on invested capital would be over 20%.

Even thought the table goes back 20 years most of the action has been in the last ten years, and if you ignore the insurance deals that brought in GenRe and GEICO most of the action has been since 2000. The momentum is definitely building with the deals getting bigger and more frequent. There are already five deals that are probably worth more $10 billion in the works for 2006, so it is already the biggest year ever for cash deals. A deal for an additional $15 Billion if it happens, would make 2006 a huge year.