“Two thirds of acquisitions don't work. Ours work because we don't try to do acquisitions — we wait for no-brainers.”
“At most corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You've got denial, you've got everything in the world. You've got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do the same thing routinely.”
“We tend to buy things — a lot of things — where we don't know exactly what will happen, but the outcome will be decent.”
“We've bought business after business because we admire the founders and what they've done with their lives. In almost all cases, they've stayed on and our expectations have not been disappointed.”
Charlie Munger (Trades, Portfolio): No One Asked Us to Buy Anadarko
