Katharine Graham and The Washington Post: An Unlikely Outsider
The book's one CEO who didn't choose the role — and who learned capital-allocation discipline on the job, partly with Warren Buffett's direct mentorship.
Katharine Graham took over The Washington Post Company after her husband's death in 1963, without prior business training and, by her own later account, without much initial confidence in the role — a strikingly different starting point from this book's other, more deliberately self-selected outsider CEOs. Her inclusion in the book is specifically because she nonetheless developed the same rigorous capital-allocation discipline over time, including one of the era's most successful corporate share buyback programs.
Warren Buffett, who became a significant Washington Post shareholder and Graham's close advisor, is credited in the book with directly mentoring her on capital-allocation principles — a real-world instance of the same value-investing framework taught throughout this Book Club being applied by an investor to help shape how a company's own CEO thought about deploying its capital.
The other CEOs profiled in this course arrived at their capital-allocation discipline through their own analytical temperament, often over long careers explicitly built around it. Graham's path — an unexpected, unwanted transition into the role, followed by genuine, documented growth into the same rigorous discipline, partly through outside mentorship — is the book's strongest evidence that this way of thinking is a learnable skill rather than a fixed trait only available to CEOs who were somehow always going to think this way.
Under Graham's leadership, The Washington Post Company conducted a substantial share buyback program at prices that, in hindsight, proved to be a genuinely disciplined, well-timed use of capital — the kind of decision that, per this course's earlier chapters, requires real conviction that a depressed price reflects mispricing rather than a justified decline. That Graham reached this same conviction without the decades of prior financial training some of the book's other CEOs had is central to why Thorndike includes her story.
- Katharine Graham is the book's clearest example of an "outsider" CEO who arrived at the role unexpectedly and without prior business training, rather than through a deliberately chosen, self-selected career path.
- She developed the same rigorous capital-allocation discipline as this course's other case studies over time, including a well-timed, disciplined share buyback program, partly through Warren Buffett's direct mentorship.
- Her story is the book's strongest argument that this discipline is learnable — a real answer to the objection that the other seven CEOs simply had an unusual, innate temperament most people don't share.