While nearly seven in 10 Singaporeans consider a degree a necessary prerequisite for success—perhaps even more so for becoming a CEO—Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett doesn’t think so.
CNBC Make It reported that when hiring CEOs for Berkshire Hathaway-owned companies like Geico and Dairy Queen, he doesn’t even check where applicants attended college.
In his latest annual shareholders letter, he wrote that business talent matters more. The 94-year-old CEO shared he “never” looks at where a candidate has gone to school.
He said, “There are great managers who attended the most famous schools. But there are plenty … who may have benefitted by attending a less prestigious institution or even by not bothering to finish school.”
Mr Buffett, who earned degrees from the University of Nebraska and Columbia University, said his view changed after seeing others succeed without Ivy League diplomas.
He pointed to his friend, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard because he decided that “it was far more important to get underway in an exploding industry that would change the world than it was to stick around for a parchment that he could hang on the wall,” he wrote in his annual shareholders’ letter released on Feb 22.
Lifelong learning doesn’t always mean college or university
Mr Buffett has avidly believed in lifelong learning, yet he noted it doesn’t always mean college or university. Speaking to students at Ivey Business School at Western University in 2012, he said, “I don’t think college is for everyone,” but added that the best education is investing in oneself.
In his letter, highlighting how business talent is largely innate, Buffett pointed to “retailing genius” Ben Rosner, a former Berkshire Hathaway executive who never studied beyond sixth grade yet built a successful retail business before selling it to Mr Buffet in 1967, as reported by The Washington Post.
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban echoed this view. In an interview last year, he noted how experience has more value than a diploma’s prestige but thinks everyone should try college.
Even Mr Gates, who chose to start a company rather than finish college, said he doesn’t promote dropping out of college, except where “the urgency is such that you interrupt those college years to do something else,” he told CNBC Make It, explaining he put off choosing Microsoft over college for as long as he could. /TISG
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