Warren Buffett on What Kills Great Businesses

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What kills a great business is if you look 
at... I do believe in looking at history. I  

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like to study failure, actually. And my partner 
says, “All I want to know is where I’ll die,  

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so I’ll never go there.” And, and we 
want to see what has caused businesses  

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to go bad. And the biggest thing 
that kills them is complacency.

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I mean, you want a restlessness, a feeling that, 
you know, that somebody is always after you,  

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but you’re going to stay ahead of them. You always 
want to be on the move. And, when you’ve got  

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a great business, you know, like 
Coca-Cola, which is, there aren’t  

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anything like Coca-Cola. But the danger 
would always be the rest on your laurels.

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But I see none of that, obviously, at Coca-Cola. 
But that is the key. To compete the same way when  

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you’ve got 1.8 billion servings being sold 
daily as when you were selling, you know,  

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ten a day. And, and that restlessness, that 
belief that tomorrow’s more exciting than today,  

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you know, you just have to have 
it permeate the organization.