Notes on "What I Learned Before I Sold to Warren Buffett"

1. Perhaps one of the key reasons Warren Buffett has been the world's most successful investor is that he does not buy turnaroud opportunities, only successful companies.
2. To know our people is to love them.
3. At Helzberg Diamonds, I sent personal hand-written notes to the folks who got great customer comments thanking them, and those notes found their way to the bulletin boards and stayed up quite a while.
4. One of the worst plans I ever instituted was having managers act as owners by rewarding them purely on a profit basis. This plan ultimately backfired because some store managers became excessively concerned with overhead rather than sales. Bonus should be based on both sales volume and net profit because profits are short term and volume is long-run.
5. You have your best people be the pioneers to prove whether it's doable or not, and then have them evaluate and refine the best techniques for getting it done. --Set the standard for success.
6. The longer you wait to communicate, the less sincere it appears.
7. The longer you wait on action that is high-priority, the less favorable the outcome will appear.
8. Set a reasonable time limit to make a decision.
9. List the pluses and minuses of each potential decision.