At bottom, these CEOs thought more like investors than managers. Fundamentally, they had confidence in their own analytical skills, and on the rare occasions when they saw compelling discrepancies between value and price, they were prepared to act boldly. When their stock was cheap, they bought it (often in large quantities), and when it was expensive, they used it to buy other companies or to raise inexpensive capital to fund future growth. If they couldn’t identify compelling projects, they were comfortable waiting, sometimes for very long periods of time (an entire decade in the case of
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