It could be every aspiring financier’s biggest dream: Spend a few hours with Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” toss him an investment suggestion or two and have some laughs over a steak lunch.
That dream became reality for 54 MBA students at the John M. Olin School of Business, who traveled to Nebraska March 30 for just such a visit with the investment genius and second-richest person in the world.
Knowing that the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in Omaha, Neb., meets with a few dozen student groups each year, second-year MBA student Erik Ahlberg made the appointment last spring. But Ahlberg had no intention of having the visit be just another field trip.
“We didn’t want to be an average group; we wanted Olin students to be invited back,” Ahlberg said. “We wanted to go to Omaha extremely prepared.”
Toward that end, Ahlberg and some of his classmates asked Michael W. Faulkender, Ph.D., the 2006-2007 Marcile and James Reid Professor and assistant professor of finance, to teach a course in preparation for the visit. Faulkender helped create a half-credit course that enabled students to acquire sufficient knowledge about Buffett and his firm to get full value out of the opportunity.
“It was a departure from most classes I teach,” Faulkender said. “Instead of drawing upon textbooks and lecturing, we discussed one of his biographies, financial-press articles and excerpts from his letters to shareholders. We watched segments of a documentary on him as well as a video of a question-and-answer session with Buffett and Bill Gates.
“I thought it was beneficial to take his investment philosophy and integrate it with what we already teach students in our MBA curriculum so they can see how these fundamental concepts have been successfully implemented,” Faulkender added.
Some students also prepared presentations suggesting business acquisitions that might interest Buffett. Ahlberg said that Buffett sat on the edge of the table listening intently as second-year student David Ramirez and first-year students David Sanders and Tony Bencina made their pitch.
“After the presentation, he said: ‘This is exactly the sort of company that I am interested in. Have you talked with the owners? Did they seem receptive?'” Ahlberg said. “It couldn’t have gone better than if we had mapped it out ourselves.”
Buffett spent two hours answering questions and sharing his wisdom with the WUSTL students and a group from Brigham Young University. Afterward, Buffett took the students for a steak lunch at a local restaurant and spent nearly 30 minutes taking pictures with the group.
Spending so much time with Buffett confirmed the rumors about his lack of pretense, said second-year student Maria Higuerey-Birgisson, one of the initial organizers.
“He has billions of dollars, but he’s a regular guy,” she said. “He loved baseball, football and steak. We were all prepared with different questions about investments and finance. But it was clear that his passion lay more in sharing his wisdom about the importance of being a good person, the kind of person that someone else would be willing to invest in.
“He talked several times about friendship and surrounding yourself with people that you not only admire and like, but that you trust,” she added. “We didn’t expect for him to speak so deeply.”