Warren Buffett says corporate America has a problem: Lots of employees 'aren't doing anything'

OMAHA — Warren Buffett says the corporate world could use fewer committees and a lot less busywork. Oh, and he's over PowerPoint, too.

Name an aggravation in business, and there’s a good chance the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway took a swipe at it Saturday. 

The setting was his annual shareholder’s meeting. But, at times, it felt as if the 85-year-old billionaire wanted to turn this gathering of 40,000 investors into a summit on management, a symposium on the dangers of bloated companies.

He criticized consultants and lawyers. He pointed out that most public company CEOs waste time “on quite a bit of things that aren't productive," including talking to Wall Street analysts. And he warned that, in many companies, lots of employees “aren't doing anything or are doing the wrong thing.”

It’s hardly the first time Buffett, who regularly notes that only 25 employees work at Berkshire’s corporate headquarters, has railed against corporate excess. But I found myself surprised at how frequently he turned questions from the audience back to his thesis that executives had made business too complicated.

In praising the Berkshire employee who planned the meeting, he pointed out that, at other companies, an entire “annual meeting department” would have been created by now. It would have a significant budget; its employees would attend conferences on putting on conferences, he said. A gaggle of consultants would assist. At Berkshire, executive assistant Carrie Sova puts on the big show with help from a few colleagues who have other jobs but pitch in.

“We don’t have any committees,” he said. “We don’t have any PowerPoints at Berkshire … we don’t have make-work activities. I’ve seen the other kind of operation and I like ours better.”

Berkshire is set up so that its 80 subsidiaries, from apparel giant Fruit of the Loom to aircraft parts manufacturer Precision Castparts, operate largely independently. Berkshire employs 360,000 people across the businesses.

Each is free to come up with its own policies. So the way Geico awards bonuses to its employees is different than NetJets or other Berkshire subsidiaries. Buffett says a one-size-fits-all approach to pay would be illogical, since each company has different goals. “Compensation isn’t as complicated as the world makes it,” he said, before making another jab at those who advise on it. “If you’re a consultant, you want to make it look complicated.”

Of course, no executives would openly say that they embrace bureaucracy. But how many quietly enable it? Maybe it’s the brainstorming meeting that, while well intentioned, leads nowhere. Or the “strategy review” that seems to be nothing more than an exercise in creating elaborate slide presentations.

Even some of the more sensitive matters in corporations — a massive acquisition, for example — could benefit from less hand-wringing, not more, Buffett argued.

Companies often hire teams of lawyers, investment bankers and, again, consultants to uncover red-flags ahead of a possible merger. Standard due diligence. It’s meant to protect investors and the company, but the nitty-gritty details don’t typically sink deals, Buffett said Saturday. (That's why he declined offers from at least one law firm — ready to bill by the hour, he noted — to help in assessing transactions.) 

“We’ve made plenty of mistakes in acquisitions,” Buffett noted. “But the mistakes are always about making an improper assessment of the economic conditions in the future of the industry or company. They’re not a bad lease. They’re not a specific labor contract. They're not a questionable patent. They’re not the things that are on the checklist for every acquisition of every major corporation in America.”

Buffett is known for closing deals over a handshake. Even the contract to allow this year’s shareholder meeting to be streamed online for the first time came in the form of a simple, one-page agreement, Andy Serwer, Yahoo Finance’s editor-in-chief, told CNBC earlier this year.

But efficiency has its limits. Buffett’s partnership with the Brazilian private-equity firm 3G Capital has come under intense criticism. 3G is known for slashing costs by shuttering operations and cutting thousands of jobs. This played out most recently after H.J. Heinz acquired Kraft Foods in a $40 billion deal backed by Berkshire and 3G; more than 5,000 people have been laid off.

An investor wondered if 3G had not only trimmed the fat, but cut into the muscle.

Buffett stayed on message, saying he watched it closely, but that its approach was sound.

“I’ve never seen anyone run things as sensibly as 3G has,” he said.

Read more of our coverage of Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting here.