The Snowball Effect

It took till this morning due to my sleepy head unable to finish the last 10-20 pages yesterday! I'm talking of The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life; wonderful written biography about a wonderful person that Buffett is. Warren begins his story with the proverbial "... behind every great fortune lies a crime" but goes on to add "Thats not true at Berkshire". As the book unfolds Warren's entire life, you find it more and more difficult to compare with other success stories, due to the high moral values that he held on to even in the worst of times. His trust in his friends and the other way round too has very less parallels too. Not only does The Snowball feel like a biography of Warren Buffett, but of a lot of his relatives and friends too, albeit shorter.

Alice Schroeder, though writing her first book, tends to describe emotional issues in such a depth so as to make sure that the reader cries! 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, but a major detail of how Warren gave into publicly listing Berkshire is something I totally missed. It was really needed to get into that biography, being such a big moment, especially because Warren was totally against getting others putting a value tag to his co.

By the way, for those who do not know, Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, listed as BRK on NYSE, is trading upwards of $100,000 and the 52 week high for it was $140,000. Even so, Buffett's view of life, in the end, is hardly a business, rather it's philanthropy.

Next: The Creation of Wealth (The Tatas from the 19th to 21st century)