“I am not a business man, I am an artist”, said Warren Buffett and legions of journalists, bloggers, academics and business people joined in the chorus and repeated him happily. This is nonsense, of course, not everyone who calls himself an artist is one. At no time in history, building an empire made you an architect, nor did signing treaties (or checks) make you a painter or draftsman. Warren Buffett is as much an artist as the rest of us are billionaires, unless he shows us some of his artistic creations. Why does a man like Warren Buffett claim to be something he clearly is not, rather than what he really is — a business man and one of the most successful ones on the planet? We can only make an educated guess here, but it seems what he meant to say was that there is some special quality in how he does business, something comparable to art, something maybe better described as creativity. Continue reading...