Kind Words and Guns

There was an interesting article in Bloomberg View last week about what makes Warren Buffet successful. Matt Levine cites two separate paragraphs in Buffett’s shareholder letter to make his point. In the first, Buffett cites Berkshire’s unique ability to make capital decisions free of status quo bias, and then to move funds without tax consequences. In the second, he paints an appealing picture of B-H as a wonderful home for a would-be seller of his business, who can sell them his business and then operate free of management meddling, protected from investment bankers under the benign Buffett-Munger umbrella.

Levine summarizes the idea nicely: “The trick is to be rigorous while seeming sentimental, to drive a hard bargain while looking like a teddy bear. Some of this is fake, just carefully engineered perception.”

Really? Carefully engineered perception? Warren Buffett!?! To paraphrase the classic line from Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that carefully engineered perception is going on here!”

It also reminds me of another classic line which is falsely credited to Al Capone: “You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

It’s a wonderful way to encapsulate a key principle of practical eloquence. However, the quote works just as well if you change it slightly, so that it reads “with either one alone.” Kind words and guns are the velvet glove and iron fist of persuasive communication. Psychologists call them warmth and strength, but the idea is the same.

Let’s look at what happens when you rely on one or the other too heavily. If you have the big guns, why would you even bother with the kind words, won’t it just get in your way? In fact, it may seem hypocritical or unauthentic to try to disguise your power. When you have power, it’s in your best interests to hide it as much as possible behind a veneer of restraint, kindness and goodwill. Would-be monopolists know this well. They have to thread the needle between telling investors about their enormous competitive advantages while assuring government regulators that they are small, defenseless players in a cutthroat world.

One of the problems with relying on the gun alone is that what goes around sometimes actually does come around. Guns alone get you immediate acquiescence at the cost of simmering resentment—the nail that sticks out gets pounded first. I had a client in a commodity-driven business that would squeeze every penny of price out of its clients in years when supply was tight, and then bemoan the fickleness of its customers who bolted to the competition when things loosened up. I’m not saying that they should not have tried to maximize their profitability, but there are ways of positioning necessities with kind words that make them more palatable. It requires more work on your part, but it’s an important investment.

On the other hand, if you are a genuinely good person (which Buffett seems to be) and have others’ interests at heart, having a big gun behind you can make you that much more effective in getting them to agree to do what is good for them. Salespeople who rely solely on relationships with their buyers sometimes forget this, and can get into trouble when times get tough for their buyers and they’re left without the gun of superior value or barriers to entry to preserve the account.

The “gun” doesn’t have to be coercion—rewards and incentives also qualify. Yet even incentives can be wrapped in kind words to take advantage of intrinsic motivation. Incentives can work very well, but they only work as long as you have the ability to provide them. They also motivate people to do just what they need to do to earn them, but nothing more. On the other hand, people will often knock themselves out for reasons of their own, for deeply personal reasons. Leaders who rely only on the gun of incentives (and the threat of withholding them) can be exposed when things go off track.

Probably there is nothing new in this article for you, but if you are climbing the ladder in the corporate world, it may be a helpful reminder. We’ve all known, and research has confirmed, that people tend to shed the kind words as they rise through the ranks, like a balloonist dropping sandbags to aid their ascent. As you gain power, it gets tempting to rely on it more and more, like favoring your stronger hand.

That’s what is striking about Warren Buffett’s performance through the years. He’s managed to keep his benevolent image in today’s culture, despite being in the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1%, and that’s almost as impressive as his investment record. As a stockholder, I hope he keeps on succeeding with his “carefully engineered perception”!