转载：巴菲特在财富杂志2011年度商人排行榜排名第一
2011-12-08 13:44阅读：
Warren Buffett: The people's Businessperson of the Year
November 17, 2011: 12:22 PM ET
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/17/warren-buffett-peoples-businessperson-of-the-year/?iid=F_F500M
Bezos may be on fire, but the Oracle wins in the end.
By
Shelley DuBois,
writer-reporter
FORTUNE -- In a battle for business dominance, would you side with
a colossal tech titan or a time-tested sage?
Amazon's (
AMZN) Jeff
Bezos and Berkshire Hathaway's (
BRKA
) Warren Buffett were the last two leaders standing after a little
over two days of voting for
Fortune's Businessperson of the Year's reader's choice award, a
March Madness-style online contest in which Fortune's staff foisted
some of the burden of choosing 2011's best in business on all of
you, our readers.
You chose Buffett.
Your votes made for some interesting match-ups throughout the
contest. For instance, a final four face-off pitted Amazon's Bezos
against an insurgent Christine Day (who ousted Google's Larry Page
from the race in Round 3), the CEO of Lululemon (
LULU), a
clothing store chain that sells high quality (and high-priced)
women's athletic wear. To be sure, there is a fast-growing market
for good-looking spandex attire, and Lululemon's stock price has
increased by over 60%, year-to-date.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos is no stranger to growth either, which is
particularly impressive given the online retailer's size: Amazon
was among Fortune's
fastest-growing companies this year and it is
No. 78 on the Fortune 500. While recent spending on warehouses
and technology has cut into its profits, the online retailer
achieved a significant milestone this past May: for the first time,
it sold more electronic than print books, certainly a victory for
the e-commerce pioneer.
Amazon released its widely anticipated Kindle Fire tablet this week
in the United States. So far, the device has received
mixed reviews from techies, but it's bound to steal market
share from Apple's (
AAPL)
dominant iPad. The Fire costs $199, less than half the price of the
cheapest comparable Apple tablet.
Of course, it's hard to compete with Berkshire Hathaway's Warren
Buffett, who has held business icon status for decades.
Not that the two executives are actually in competition. In fact,
they're friends. Back in 1999,
Bezos heard Buffett speak at Allen & Co.'s Sun Valley
summit about how many investors lost money on the automotive and
aviation industries, both over-hyped sectors at one point. Bezos
saw the parallel in the dot-com world and used Buffett's words as
motivation to work harder. 'We still have the opportunity to be a
footnote in the e-commerce industry,' Bezos told Fortune.
Bezos' efforts have paid off. 'I probably would have voted for
him,' Buffett told Fortune.
Bezos has Buffett's confidence in part because he is so good at one
of the most simple and important parts of smart business: ensuring
that customers enjoy their experience with the company. 'You can't
do anything about what's happening in Europe, but you can do
something about what your customers feel,' Buffett says, a piece of
advice he frequently offers to business students.
Buffett has recently made big investments in Bezos' tech territory,
an industry that he has mostly avoided. This past week, Berkshire
Hathaway disclosed that it had made a $10.7 billion purchase of 64
million shares of IBM (
IBM), and that
it has also made smaller investments in Intel (
INTC) and
DirecTV (
DTV).
Buffett has been on a bit of a stock-buying spree this year. In
fact, he spent $20 billion on stock purchases during the three
months ending in September 30, which happened to be the worst
quarter in U.S. stock history, amid uncertainty over European debt
and the aftermath of the U.S. credit downgrade.
Many took those investments as a sign that the economy was set to
improve, which is something that Buffett believes.
'I got out of school in 1951,' Buffet says. 'In that time, I
remember hearing all these people saying we're going to run into
recessions, and I've been hearing it ever since. But this country
works. It doesn't work for everybody as well as it should, but
compared to anything else the world has ever seen, it's
astounding.'
When asked what could have set him apart as a businessperson this
year, after a lifetime of sound investments, Buffett says that the
publicity surrounding his opinion on the U.S. tax situation could
have played a part. He published an op-ed in the
New York
Times this summer arguing that America's super-wealthy should
be paying a higher percentage of their income in federal taxes than
they do now. After the piece ran, the Obama Administration
named its own tax proposal -- slightly different from the one
that Buffett outlined -- after the billionaire.
And that is a level of street cred that even the most prominent
online retail guru cannot challenge. Bezos may be on fire, but the
Oracle wins in the end.
Fortune's Businessperson of the Year
Reader's Choice -- Tell us who YOU think is the best in
business in 2011
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/business-person-of-the-year/index.html?iid=SF_F_LN
