Lazy and Dumb

From Warren Buffett’s Q&A with MBA students at the University of Georgia, July 18, 2001. Buffett had just walked the room through a thought experiment: pick one classmate and receive 10% of their lifetime earnings; also pick one to short and pay 10% of theirs. The answer to both sides, he told them, has nothing to do with grades or physical traits, only character. Then the three-qualities line, in his fuller delivery: “We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.”

Integrity scales the other two traits asymmetrically. The three look like independent boxes to check, and on that view an intelligent, energetic candidate without integrity scores two out of three. Buffett’s wisecrack rejects that arithmetic: when integrity is missing, intelligence and energy don’t go to zero, they reverse sign. The smarter and more driven the bad actor, the more damage they can do; the lazy and dumb version is harmless.