No Credit for Predicting Rain

This is a folk leadership maxim with no single primary source. The “Noah rule” framing comes from Warren Buffett’s 2001 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, in the Principles of Insurance Underwriting section: explaining why Berkshire’s General Re unit had carried uncompensated terrorism risk on September 11, Buffett writes, “I violated the Noah rule: Predicting rain doesn’t count; building arks does.” The closer ancestor of the “no credit / only credit” reframing is Ben Horowitz’s July 20, 2010 a16z post, “No Credit for Predicting Rain”, which closes by relaying advice from “an old friend”: At a certain point in the process, no credit will be given for predicting rain. The only credit will be for helping to build an ark. Horowitz does not name the friend, and the line has since circulated stripped of both lineages.

Buffett’s line is a confession about not converting forecast into action, written by an investor diagnosing his own underwriting. Horowitz’s line is operating instruction: during a crisis, the people who predicted it are not the people you reward.