We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

Essentially these books consist of asking the reader to forget about the forest of Churchill’s life and instead focus on a few trees that a given writer believes deserve more attention

Since the early 1980s, the Berkshire annual reports have informed shareholders of the performance of the holdings of the company and new investments, updated the status of the insurance and the reinsurance industry, and (since 1982) have listed acquisition criteria about business Berkshire would like to purchase. The report is generously laced with examples, analogies, stories, and metaphors containing the do's and dont's of proper investing in stocks.

In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition - futile if we think in terms of a planed economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any planner would recommend.

Most of my professors can’t see the wider forest of meaning because they’ve become obsessed with a few mostly meaningless trees.

Just because Charlie and I can clearly see dramatic growth ahead for an industry does not mean we can judge what its profit margins and returns on capital will be as a host of competitors battle for supremacy. At Berkshire we will stick with businesses whose profit picture for decades to come seems reasonably predictable. Even then, we will make plenty of mistakes.

Trees sequester carbon, harvest water, produce food, and convert sunlight into energy. Those are the four characteristics I would love a city to have. The resiliency of forests is to be emulated. And that’s the reason why I picked forests as my biomimic. I want my city to be as resilient as Earth’s s.
The main reason why is occurring is to make room for farms. Before there was farming, which was about ten to twelve thousand years ago, we had six trillion trees. We now have three trillion trees. We’ve cut down half of the Earth’s ability to capture carbon. We’re not going to replace all of that with new trees. But if we got back up to five trillion trees, let’s say, simply by leaving the remaining forests alone and letting them repopulate and selectively harvesting, the Earth’s temperature rise would begin to slow down. And, once you’ve slowed it down, that gives you time to reflect and to prepare for these changes that are not going to go away. Replacing three trillion trees by planting them—that’s not going to work. We’ll never be able to do that. So we have to let nature do that part. And, in order to do that, we have to return a lot of farmland back to what it used to be, which was forests.

Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?

What’s out of sight, however, should not be out of mind: Those unrecorded retained earnings are usually building value — lots of value — for Berkshire.

Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.

Focus on the seeds, not the trees. What seeds are you planting today?

trees should be trees

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

But we will never allow Berkshire to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations and multiple layers of management. Instead, we plan to operate as a collection of separately-managed medium-sized and large businesses, most of whose decision-making occurs at the operating level. Charlie and I will limit ourselves to allocating capital, controlling enterprise risk, choosing managers and setting their compensation.