Charlie Munger: The Power Of Extended Confucianism

In this interview with HBO and the Kunhardt Film Foundation, Charlie Munger discusses the power of extended confucianism. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Well he [Warren] came out of a private partnership where people he knew were trusting him a lot when he was obscure and he had his relatives in the partnership and they were not rich.

So he has always had a good stewardship idea and as it got bigger started treating everybody else the way he treated his relatives. That is a very good idea.

I have a name for it. I call it extended confucianism. It’s a very good idea to extend your confucianism certainly to suppliers and customers and so on. It’s so powerful. I constantly talk about Berkshire as a seamless web of deserved trust. It’s such a simple idea.

Bureaucracy has so much dysfunction and evil buried in it even when the people in the bureaucracy are not awful people. Running a system that has practically no bureaucracy at headquarters is hugely advantageous to Berkshire.

You can watch the full interview here: