Tap Dancing to Work: The NotMakingThisUp Book Review

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 Carol Loomis is an editor at Fortune Magazinewho not only brought Warren Buffett to the attention of a wide American investingaudience through her own beautifully written articles in Fortune, but also becamethe one person Buffett himself trusted to edit his now-famous annualshareholder letters, which he writes longhand before getting her input in aprocess that takes several months each year.  Loomis has also been a close friend, not tomention a bridge partner, of his for decades, and Buffett thinks so highly of herintegrity that he put the 2006 blockbuster announcement of his $40 billioncharitable gift to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in her hands a monthbefore the actual press release went out, so Fortune could break the news in acover story. Oh, and she always asks the first question atthe Berkshire shareholder meeting, pulling no punches for her friend in theprocess. So if there were one person you’d like to seea Buffett book from, it would be Carol Loomis.  And although this book isn’t that book—it’s more a Fortune Magazine compilation, edited by Loomis, of pieces about Buffett by many people,including Loomis—it still has plenty of insights from which any investor,whether a Buffett fan or not, would benefit. The best, not surprisingly, come from thoseclosest to him…for example, Bill Gates, who, in a 1996 “book review” of RogerLowenstein’s excellent Buffett biography describes the intellectual spark thatbonded him to Buffett the first time they ever meet. For sure, Gates is not much of a reviewer—hecalled Lowenstein’s book “competently written,” which is like calling Copolla’sThe Godfather “competently filmed”—buthe tells us a few very interesting things about Buffett that we haven’t alreadyheard a million times. And there are just enough of those, from Gatesand others, to make this book worth buying, and reading: the “model in his headof the whole world” Buffett carries; the dice trick he tried to spring on Gates, who nevertheless figured out the trick; the way he structures incentive pay depending onwhat drives each of Berkshire’s CEO’s businesses; and how he—an old-fashionedknee-jerk liberal Democrat—challenges others to think about the world at large(not just about investments). As for the Buffett book we’d like to see fromCarol Loomis, it’ll probably never happen, at least in Buffett’s lifetime.  But if it were, readers would be treated toinsights on Buffett one can only imagine, with the kind of sentences only Carolcan write—as these first paragraphs of one of her “Tap Dancing” contributions remindsus: Just in from Omaha and making a do-it-yourselfdelivery, Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett strolled into the downtownManhattan offices of Harris Trust on March 5 [1995] and handed two envelopes toa Harris officer.  In Envelope No.1 wasstock worth, gulp, $2.5 billion, Berkshire’s 20 million shares of CapitalCities/ABC, being delivered to the company’s purchase, Walt Disney Co. InEnvelope No. 2, sealed and marked “Do not open until 4:30 P.M. on March 7,”were Buffett’s wishes—kept secret from even the managements of Disney and CapCities—as to how he wanted Berkshire to be paid for the contents of EnvelopeNo. 1…” Would that “Tap Dancing to Work” was a trueCarol Loomis memoir of her of decades with Warren Buffett…but as collectionsgo, it’s worth plenty on its own.
Jeff MatthewsAuthor “Secrets in PlainSight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett”(eBooks on Investing,2012)    Available now at Amazon.com
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