Not long after I first met Warren Buffett back in 1991, I asked him to recommend his favorite book about business. He didn’t miss a beat: “It’s Business Adventures, by John Brooks,” he said. “I’ll send you my copy.” I was intrigued: I had never heard of Business Adventures or John Brooks.

Today, more than two decades after Warren lent it to me—and more than four decades after it was first published—Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read. John Brooks is still my favorite business writer. (And Warren, if you’re reading this, I still have your copy.)

A skeptic might wonder how this out-of-print collection of New Yorker articles from the 1960s could have anything to say about business today. After all, in 1966, when Brooks profiled Xerox, the company’s top-of-the-line copier weighed 650 pounds, cost $27,500, required a full-time operator, and came with a fire extinguisher because of its tendency to overheat. A lot has changed since then.

It’s certainly true that many of the particulars of business have changed. But the fundamentals have not. Brooks’s deeper insights about business are just as relevant today as they were back then. In terms of its longevity, Business Adventures stands alongside Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, the 1949 book that Warren says is the best book on investing that he has ever read.

Brooks grew up in New Jersey during the Depression, attended Princeton University (where he roomed with future Secretary of State George Shultz), and, after serving in World War II, turned to journalism with dreams of becoming a novelist. In addition to his magazine work, he published a handful of books, only some of which are still in print. He died in 1993.

As the journalist Michael Lewis wrote in his foreword to Brooks’s book The Go-Go Years, even when Brooks got things wrong, “at least he got them wrong in an interesting way.” Unlike a lot of today’s business writers, Brooks didn’t boil his work down into pat how-to lessons or simplistic explanations for success. (How many times have you read that some company is taking off because they give their employees free lunch?) You won’t find any listicles in his work. Brooks wrote long articles that frame an issue, explore it in depth, introduce a few compelling characters, and show how things went for them.

In one called “The Impacted Philosophers,” he uses a case of price-fixing at General Electric to explore miscommunication—sometimes intentional miscommunication—up and down the corporate ladder. It was, he writes, “a breakdown in intramural communication so drastic as to make the building of the Tower of Babel seem a triumph of organizational rapport.”

In “The Fate of the Edsel,” he refutes the popular explanations for why Ford’s flagship car was such a historic flop. It wasn’t because the car was overly poll-tested; it was because Ford’s executives only pretended to be acting on what the polls said. “Although the Edsel was supposed to be advertised, and otherwise promoted, strictly on the basis of preferences expressed in polls, some old-fashioned snake-oil selling methods, intuitive rather than scientific, crept in.” It certainly didn’t help that the first Edsels “were delivered with oil leaks, sticking hoods, trunks that wouldn’t open, and push buttons that…couldn’t be budged with a hammer.”

One of Brooks’s most instructive stories is “Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox.” (The headline alone belongs in the Journalism Hall of Fame.) The example of Xerox is one that everyone in the tech industry should study. Starting in the early ’70s, the company funded a huge amount of R&D that wasn’t directly related to copiers, including research that led to Ethernet networks and the first graphical user interface (the look you know today as Windows or OS X).

But because Xerox executives didn’t think these ideas fit their core business, they chose not to turn them into marketable products. Others stepped in and went to market with products based on the research that Xerox had done. Both Apple and Microsoft, for example, drew on Xerox’s work on graphical user interfaces.

I know I’m not alone in seeing this decision as a mistake on Xerox’s part. I was certainly determined to avoid it at Microsoft. I pushed hard to make sure that we kept thinking big about the opportunities created by our research in areas like computer vision and speech recognition. Many other journalists have written about Xerox, but Brooks’s article tells an important part of the company’s early story. He shows how it was built on original, outside-the-box thinking, which makes it all the more surprising that as Xerox matured, it would miss out on unconventional ideas developed by its own researchers.

Brooks was also a masterful storyteller. He could craft a page-turner like “The Last Great Corner,” about the man who founded the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain and his attempt to foil investors intent on shorting his company’s stock. I couldn’t wait to see how things turned out for him. (Here’s a spoiler: Not well.) Other times you can almost hear Brooks chuckling as he tells some absurd story. There’s a passage in “The Fate of the Edsel” in which a PR man for Ford organizes a fashion show for the wives of newspaper reporters. The host of the fashion show turns out to be a female impersonator, which might seem edgy today but would have been scandalous for a major American corporation in 1957. Brooks notes that the reporters’ wives “were able to give their husbands an extra paragraph or two for their stories.”

Brooks’s work is a great reminder that the rules for running a strong business and creating value haven’t changed. For one thing, there’s an essential human factor in every business endeavor. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect product, production plan, and marketing pitch; you’ll still need the right people to lead and implement those plans.

That is a lesson you learn quickly in business, and I’ve been reminded of it at every step of my career, first at Microsoft and now at the foundation. Which people are you going to back? Do their roles fit their abilities? Do they have both the IQ and EQ to succeed? Warren is famous for this approach at Berkshire Hathaway, where he buys great businesses run by wonderful managers and then gets out of the way.

Business Adventures is as much about the strengths and weaknesses of leaders in challenging circumstances as it is about the particulars of one business or another. In that sense, it is still relevant not despite its age but because of it. John Brooks’s work is really about human nature, which is why it has stood the test of time.

最佳商業書我讀過
由比爾·蓋茨 於2014年7月12日
沒多久，我第一次見到巴菲特早在1991年，我請他推薦自己最喜歡的書有關的業務。他沒有錯過任何一個節拍：“這是商業冒險，由約翰·布魯克斯，“他說。“我給你我的一份。”我很好奇：我從來沒有聽說過商業冒險或約翰·布魯克斯。
今天，沃倫在超過二十年的借給我，和超過四十年後，這是首次出版，商業冒險仍然是最好的商業書我讀過。約翰·布魯克斯仍然是我最喜歡的商業作家。（和沃倫，如果你正在讀這篇文章，我仍然有你的一份。）
懷疑論者可能會懷疑這一點的絕版珍藏如何紐約客從20世紀60年代的文章能有今天的事情說一下生意。畢竟，在1966年，當布魯克斯異形施樂公司，該公司的頂級的線，複印機稱650磅，耗資27,500美元需要一個全職的運營商，並來到這裡是因為它的過熱傾向用滅火器。自那時以來已經改變了很多。
這是千真萬確的許多業務的詳情已經改變。但基本面沒有。關於商業布魯克斯的更深刻的見解今天也同樣相關，因為他們是當時的情況。在它的壽命而言，商業冒險站在旁邊本傑明·格雷厄姆的聰明的投資者，在1949年的書沃倫說，這是對投資，他已經讀過的最好的書。

布魯克斯成長於新澤西州的大蕭條時期，參加了普林斯頓大學（在那裡他與室的住房國務未來國務卿舒爾茨），並在第二次世界大戰後服，轉向新聞與成為一名小說家的夢想。除了他的雜誌社工作，他出版了一把書，只有其中一些仍然在打印。他死於1993年。
正如記者邁克爾·劉易斯寫在他的前言中布魯克斯的書去去年，即使布魯克斯得到的東西錯了，“至少他得到了他們錯了一種有趣的方式。”不像很多當今的商業作家，布魯克斯也沒熬他的工作分解成拍的how-to課或簡單化的解釋為成功。（有多少次，你看的一些公司正在起飛，因為他們給員工的免費午餐？）你不會找到任何listicles在他的工作。布魯克斯寫長文章的框架問題，探索它的深度，介紹幾個引人注目的人物，並顯示的東西如何去對他們。
在一個名為“受影響的哲學家，”他用操縱價格的情況下，在通用電氣，探討溝通不暢，有時故意誤傳，向上和向下的企業階梯。這是，他寫道，“在校內的通信故障如此激烈，以使巴別塔的建築似乎組織關係的勝利。”
在“在埃德塞爾的命運，”他駁斥了流行的解釋為什麼福特的旗艦車是這樣一個歷史性的失敗。這不是因為車是過於投票測試; 這是因為福特的高管只有假裝作用於民調說什麼。“雖然埃茲爾是應該予以公告，並以其他方式推廣，嚴格的表達在投票調查中偏好的基礎上，一些老式的蛇油銷售方式，直觀而不是科學，躡手躡腳進來。”這當然沒有幫助第一Edsels“交付與漏油，粘頭套，樹幹，不會公開，並推動了...不能用錘子不為所動按鈕。”
其中布魯克斯最有啟發性的故事是“施樂施樂施樂施樂”（單獨的標題屬於名人堂的新聞大廳。）施樂的例子是，每個人都在高科技產業應研究。始於二十世紀七十年代，該公司資助了大量的R＆D的是沒有直接關係的複印機，其中包括導致以太網絡的研究和第一圖形用戶界面（你今天所知道的Windows或OS X的外觀）。
但由於施樂公司的高管沒有想到這些想法適合自己的核心業務，他們選擇不把他們變成適銷對路的產品。其他臨危受命，前往與市場研究的基礎上，施樂做過的產品。蘋果和微軟為例，借鑒了施樂的圖形化用戶界面​​的工作。
我知道我不是一個人在看到這個決定對施樂公司的部分錯誤。我當然確定，以避免它在微軟。我拼盡全力，以確保我們一直在想大有關我們的研究，像計算機視覺和語音識別領域所創造的機會。其他許多媒體記者都寫了施樂公司，但布魯克斯的文章講述了公司早期的故事的重要組成部分。他展示了它是如何建立在原始的，外面的現成的思想，這使得它更令人驚訝的是施樂成熟，它將錯過了自己的研究人員開發了超常規的想法。

布魯克斯也是一個高超的說書人。他可以製作一個網頁，車工像“最後的大轉角，”是誰創辦的Piggly搖擺雜貨連鎖店的男子和他的企圖挫敗投資者有意做空，他的公司的股票。我迫不及待地想看到的東西如何變成了他。（這裡有一個擾流板：不很好。）其他時候，你幾乎可以聽到布魯克斯笑著，因為他告訴了一些荒唐的故事。有沒有在“在埃德塞爾的命運”，在其中一個公關人福特舉辦的時裝秀為報社記者的妻子的通道。時尚節目主持人原來是一個女的模仿，這似乎心急火燎的今天，但會在1957年被可恥的一家大型美國公司。布魯克斯指出，記者的妻子“能夠給自己的丈夫一個額外的段落或二為他們的故事。“
布魯克斯的工作是一個很大的提醒，為運行強大的業務和創造價值的規則並沒有改變。對於一件事，有一個在每一個企業的努力的重要人為因素。如果你有一個完美的產品，生產計劃和營銷策略也沒關係; 你仍然需要合適的人來領導和執行這些計劃。
那是你快速的業務引以為戒，我一直在提醒它在我的職業生涯的每一步，首先在微軟和現在的基礎。哪些人你要回來嗎？難道他們的角色適合他們的能力？他們有兩個智商和情商成功嗎？沃倫是著名的這種做法在伯克希爾·哈撒韋公司，在那裡他買了美妙的管理者經營的大企業，然後獲取的出路。
商業冒險，是既要在困難的情況下領導者的優勢和劣勢，因為它是關於一個業務或其他的細節。從這個意義上講，它仍然是不相關的，儘管因為它的年齡，但。約翰·布魯克斯的作品是真正關心人性，這就是為什麼它經受住了時間的考驗。