14 THE INVESTOR
- CREATIVITY: SEEING THE BIG PICTURE
AND USING METAPHORS
A recent issue of Forbes magazine contained 12 ads for financial
firms, all stressing their creative edge. Success in today’s rapidly
changing world requires innovation at all levels: portfolio selec-
tion, asset allocation, marketing, recruiting, and so on. Ralph
Wanger, one of our masters, is a fan of the metaphor as a creative
tool. He encourages analysts to use metaphors to play with their
ideas and avoid “hardening of the categories.” Furthermore, Wanger
believes that intuition is a valuable ally, especially when it is devel-
oped through experience on the job. (More on intuition later.)
Also important is humor. Humor is a sign of a creative mind.
These masters all have their own brand of wit, revealing their
creativity. Lynch playfully speaks of finding great investment ideas
in the malls, where his wife—who has a black belt in shopping—
accompanies him. He quips that if you spend 13 minutes a year
studying economics, you’ve wasted 10 minutes. And he tries to find
companies that any fool could run, because eventually one will. A
playful mind won’t get hardening of the categories.
Similarly, Buffett is renowned for his dry sense of humor. He
says that one strategy for increasing sales at Sees Candy stores was
to spread the rumor that the candy is an aphrodisiac. It worked
wonderfully. (The rumor, that is, not the candy.) He also writes
that he and his partner, Charlie Munger, can compose a four-page
memo with three grunts on the telephone. He bounces his ideas off
Munger, who always tells Buffett that they are dumb. When Munger
says they are really dumb, then Buffett reconsiders; but when they
are evaluated as merely “dumb,” then he takes that as a vote of
confidence and goes forward. He says of his relationship with
Munger that they will be working together for many years to come,
until eventually one day they look over at one another in the office
and think, “Who is that guy sitting over there?”
The humor in these remarks reveals a playfulness that allows02 ware 14 1/19/01, 12:59 PM