business analysis 40
Based on Chapter 32 of AMERICANA, Finance, please watch and analyze the documentary
- Becoming Warren Buffet
Becoming Warren Buffett
As you review and analyze….
Be sure to analyze. Students are often puzzled when their professors mark them down for summarizing or merely narrating rather than analyzing. What does it mean to analyze? In the narrow sense, to analyze
means to break down into parts and to study the interrelationships of those parts.
Historical analysis is critical; it evaluates sources, assigns significance to causes,
and weighs competing explanations. You might think of summary and analysis this way: Who, what, when,
and where are the stuff of summary; how, why, and to what effect are the stuff of analysis. Many students think that they have to give a long summary (to show the professor that they know the facts) before they get
to their analysis – select two or three themes or points or emphasis and support those themes/ points of emphasis with “direct quotes” from the documentaries.
A wise analysis may recall our old friends J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt , Secretary of the Treasury Mellon from the Gilded Age for comparison….
Many of us have written in the POCD framework (People/ Opportunity / Context/ Deal) …..this may be appropriate for a “finance” analysis.