Description
Because I have long been the chief writer about Warren Buffett at Fortune, which for decades has covered him more closely than any other business publication, I have often been asked whether I'm not going to branch out and write a Buffett biography. I have always said no, sure beyond a doubt that a writer who is a good friend of the subject does not make a good biographer. And I have indeed been a close friend of Warren's for more than forty years, a shareholder in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, for almost that long, and the pro bono editor of his annual letter to shareholders for thirty-five. All of those facts can be accommodated in my Fortune articles about Buffett, simply by my informing the reader that they exist. But they are not a firm base for a wide ranging personal and professional biography, in which there should be considerable distance between writer and subject. Its absence in this case settled the question.
But then it dawned on me that the scores of Buffett articles we have published in Fortune are in themselves a business biography-and a perfect one for a book. Here you have it: Tap Dancing to Work, the description that Buffett has long applied to his love for running Berkshire. This book is a collection, arranged chronologically for the most part, of all our big articles about Warren (plus some shorter, lighter ones like "Are Jimmy and Warren Buffett Related?"). For each of the big stories I've written an introduction or commentary-about forty of them in total. These paragraphs explain, for example, what's particularly important about the story, what Warren forecast that did or didn't come true, what he thinks today about the story's main point. Overall, the book's material covers a large chunk of history-forty-six years-an important span of time not only for Buffett but for the U.S. economy in which he has so successfully operated. ("Hmm, forty-six years," Buffett would be inclined to say. "That's a long time-almost one-fifth of the years the U.S. has existed.")
ISBN:97815915845737
