What Greg Abel’s First Nine Months Reveal About Succeeding Warren Buffett

“Greg runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values.” That is how Warren Buffett described Berkshire Hathaway’s new arrangement in his letter to shareholders on Sept. 18, the day he gave up the chairman title he had held since 1970. Most of the coverage read the line as the end of Buffett’s story, but it also can be read as a report card on Greg Abel’s first nine months as CEO, written by the one person in a position to grade them. Buffett said as much: he decided to step down after Abel exceeded his very high expectations. 

Over six decades, Buffett became the public face of a particular idea of business: patient capital, plain speaking, decentralized management and the belief that enormous wealth could coexist with a recognizable set of personal values. His annual letters to shareholders and appearances at the company’s annual meeting turned him into something closer to a corporate folk hero. Now that Buffett has finally let go of the wheel, Abel is inheriting an organization whose philosophy has been unusually closely identified with one person. For anyone taking over from a founder or long-tenured leader, that record is worth studying. The lessons are in what Abel has done, in public, with the whole market watching. 

The situation Abel inherited

In The First 90 Days, I describe five kinds of business situations a leader can walk into. The one that looks easiest, inheriting an organization that is performing well and taking it to the next level, is often the hardest to get right, because there’s nothing obvious to fix and a lot to break. That was Abel’s situation. Berkshire is a trillion-dollar company with close to 400,000 employees across dozens of subsidiaries. When he took over, it was sitting on $373 billion in cash, and the person who had accumulated that cash was still chairman and still coming into the office.

In a sustaining-success situation, the challenge isn’t fixing anything. It’s figuring out what you are allowed to change, how fast and how to show the people who built the place that you understand what made it work. Abel had one advantage many successors may not have: he had been inside Berkshire since 1999. But a legend is a hard act to follow, whether you were promoted or hired, and the four things he did apply either way.

Build the team before day one

In December 2025, before he formally took over, Abel announced his team so that he could hit the ground running in January. Todd Combs, one of Berkshire’s two investment managers and the CEO of Geico, left for JPMorgan; the CFO of 40 years announced his retirement; a general counsel role was created; and NetJets CEO Adam Johnson was put in charge of the consumer, service and retail businesses so that Abel would have less on his plate. Abel made all of those calls while Buffett still held every title.

This is the sequence to copy if your board will let you. People decisions made before you are formally in the chair are likely to be read as preparation; the same decisions in your third month will read more like a verdict on the people your predecessor chose. So if you have been named but not yet seated, use that window. Ask for the room to make your structural calls now, and be sure to make them alongside your predecessor, not around them.

Say what stays, and show it

Abel was clear early about what would not change. At the annual meeting in May, he said Berkshire would not divest subsidiaries or break up the group, and he called it an efficient conglomerate without layers of management. Then he showed it. His first acquisition, the homebuilder Taylor Morrison, was announced May 31 at $6.8 billion in cash, a 24 percent premium, in a business Berkshire already understood through the 15 regional homebuilders it owned. Taylor Morrison’s CEO stayed on to run it. Buffett told CNBC that Abel had done the deal faster and more smoothly than he could have, and that he himself never spoke to the other company’s chief executive.

That is what an early win looks like in a sustaining-success situation. It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing you can do. It has to be something that is clearly yours and clearly consistent with the culture, such as a deal in a business your organization already knows, run by a team it already trusts. If your first visible decision breaks with how the place has always worked, you likely will spend the next year explaining it. If it fits, you get credit for the judgment and the culture gets credit for the outcome, and both are fine.

Change what is yours to change

Which of your predecessor’s decisions are now yours to remake? Abel’s first shareholder letter, in March, answered that in a line: responsibility for the equity portfolio “ultimately resides with me as CEO.” Buffett had been a net seller of stocks for 14 consecutive quarters and had effectively stopped buybacks. By the end of June, Berkshire was a net buyer of equities for the first time in more than three years and had repurchased $4.5 billion of its own shares in a quarter. Abel also set a 20-year benchmark for the company’s progress and committed to buying Berkshire stock with his own money every year.

Notice what he changed: capital allocation, which he had just said was his. Notice what he did not: the operating model, which he had just said was Berkshire’s. If you are succeeding a legend, your organization will watch for exactly that distinction, whether or not you draw it, so draw it for them. Say which decisions now belong to you, make a few of them early, and leave the rest visibly alone.

Manage the predecessor as a boss

Buffett did not disappear on Jan. 1. He kept the chair, kept coming to the office and was still telling CNBC in July which Berkshire investments he had started. A predecessor who stays is a boss who knows the business better than you do and has no formal authority over your calendar. The record shows how Abel handled it. He took over the annual letter. Buffett did not appear onstage at the May meeting; Abel did, with Ajit Jain in the morning and with two operating leaders, Johnson and BNSF’s Katie Farmer, in the afternoon. And Buffett’s account of the Taylor Morrison deal, a phone call the day before it was announced and no contact with the other side, suggests Abel was informing him instead of asking first.

The rule for leaders with a new boss is simple: don’t surprise your boss. It applies with double force when your boss is the person you replaced. It’s essential that your predecessor never hears about a decision from someone else first, because a predecessor who has been surprised will trust your next decision less. Buffett’s decision to hand over the chair less than nine months in is the best public evidence of what that looks like when it works.

Questions for a leader following a legend

Nine months, however, is not a verdict. Berkshire’s stock has trailed the market this year, and some investors think Abel is deploying cash too fast. Jain, who runs the insurance operations, has no named successor; Abel says the board has a plan. The division-president layer under Johnson could stay a one-off or become a pattern, and that will say more about the operating model than any letter. Buffett’s sentence is the most informed grade available. But it’s one person’s judgment, given early, and the questions below are the ones that will determine whether a successor’s own board and market come to the same conclusion about the transition.

• What is your situation, in plain terms: something to fix, or something to sustain and extend?
• Which people decisions can you make before your start date, and who has to agree?
• What is the first visible decision that is both yours and consistent with how the organization works?
• Which decisions are now yours, and have you said so out loud?
• If your predecessor is staying, decide what they will hear from you first, every time, and write it down.

The Archer’s Edge: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Practice for Business Leaders by Michael Watkins and Juan Carlos Holgado is out on 1st October, published by Wiley, priced £32.99.