The five most dangerous words in business may be “everybody else is doing it.”

Warren Buffett in Sept. 27 2006 memo to The All-Stars, an elite group of Berkshire Hathaway managers as reported by MSNBC.com

Long admired for his financial risk savvy, Warren Buffett is now showing off his legal risk savvy.

He warns that the phrase “everybody else is doing it” should be a red flag and that more than one company has relied on that phrase to its detriment.  Look no further than the current options backdating scandal and engineered accounting practices of Enron and Worldcom.

“Start with what is legal, but always go on to what we would feel comfortable about being printed on the front page of our local paper,” he cautions.

Warren, I couldn’t have said it better myself, even though it took me close to 300 pages to lay out my Legal Leverage® Process Portfolio and tee up the same leadership challenge in The Business Guide to Legal Literacy: What Every Manager Should Know About the Law (Jossey-Bass, 2006).

I think I love you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 11:08 am and is filed under Business Blind Spots, Leadership, Quote of the Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.