Shareholder Friendly
If you, like many shareholders, tend to skip annual meetings, let financial writer Randy Cepuch persuade you to make a trip or two. Cepuch braved boredom, hunger, and disgruntled shareholders to attend dozens of meetings, including those of Playboy, Starbucks, Google, and Wal-Mart. His discoveries, documented in A Weekend With Warren Buffett, changed the way he felt about his investments.
Angry union employees with an inflatable rat at a 2002 Hershey meeting temporarily dampened his appetite for chocolate. In Seattle, Cepuch became suspicious when a Starbucks presentation labeled Shanghai and Hawaii as foreign countries. And he didn't jibe with Wal-Mart's ever-present rallying cry, "Whose Wal-Mart is it?" (Correct answer: "It's my Wal-Mart.")
Cepuch is more concerned with a company's overall mood, something he says you can best determine in person at one of these events. (Starbucks, with its free coffee, and Wal-Mart, with its celebrity cameos, more than made up for their missteps.)
As the title suggests, Cepuch most enjoys the meetings of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. He admires Buffett's accessibility, common-sense approach, and long-term outlook. The free Beatles CDs and Rubik's cubes didn't hurt, either.
From Chef to CEO
New York restaurateur Danny Meyer was lunching a short hop from the White House in Washington, D.C., but he was hardly out of his element. It was the first day that Central, chef Michel Richard's new casual venue, was serving lunch, and Meyer found himself holding court at the open-kitchen brasserie. A nonstop stream of patrons and staff came over to greet Meyer, the owner of Union Square Café, Eleven Madison Park, and eight other Manhattan eateries. Richard himself ordered up fried chicken and a glass of white Montrachet for his fellow chef.
But writing the recent business book Setting the Table did take Meyer, previously the author of two recipe collections, out of his comfort zone. "It took awhile to come to terms with the idea of being CEO of a restaurant company," says Meyer between bites of a tomato burrata salad drizzled with basil oil. A St. Louis native, Meyer started Union Square Café in 1985 when he was only 27. He now runs the Union Square Hospitality Group, which employs 1,500 people. Along the way, he realized that the restaurant business has a lot to teach companies about the service economy. "Restaurants have a certain mystique, but they are essentially manufacturing and sales companies," he says.
Setting the Table preaches enlightened hospitality-taking care of employees, guests, community, suppliers, and investors, in that order. Meyer says that making customers feel special is what defines successful businesses. While Meyer sips espresso, a fan asks him to sign the book. Whipping out a blue marker he carries just for that purpose and bantering with the reader, Meyer no longer seems ill at ease shouldering his new mantle of business guru.
This story appears in the February 26, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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