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When Warren Buffett is asked about the best business manager he’s ever encountered, he doesn’t point to a famous CEO or a textbook framework. He points to his close friend and mentor, the legendary broadcasting executive Tom Murphy — and the lesson he learned from him has as much to do with restraint as it does with results.
For anyone leading a team inside the startup ecosystem in Canada, where small teams and high-pressure decisions are the norm, Buffett’s reflection on Murphy offers a management lesson that’s easy to admire and surprisingly hard to practice.
“I Learned How to Behave”
When asked what he took away from working alongside Murphy, Buffett’s answer is part joke, part genuine tribute:
“I learned how to behave. He was probably the best business manager I’ve ever run into, but he didn’t do it by whipping people to death for eight hours or turning it into 12 hour days. He brought out the best in everybody . . . If you did nothing but study him, you wouldn’t have to study anybody else.”
Notice what’s absent from that description: pressure, long hours, and fear-based management. Murphy’s reputation as one of the best managers Buffett has ever seen wasn’t built on intensity — it was built on his ability to bring out the best in the people around him.
The Advice That Stuck: “You Can Always Tell Somebody to Go to Hell Tomorrow”
Of all the lessons Buffett took from Murphy, one piece of advice has stayed with him for decades:
“He told me: You can always tell somebody to go to hell tomorrow.”
It’s a simple line, but the discipline behind it is significant. Buffett elaborates on just how much this one piece of advice has saved him from:
“Just think of how much trouble that keeps you out of . . . There’s a few letters or things I haven’t written because I remember that advice. It’s very human to want to tell somebody to go to hell, and what have you ever gained? The only thing is you may have felt a little bit better for it. It is satisfying . . . But you can have a lot of satisfaction the next day if you just keep [it to yourself].”
Why This Lesson Matters More Than It Seems
The instinct to react immediately — to send the sharp email, to push back hard in the moment, to say the thing that feels satisfying in the moment — is one of the most common traps for leaders under pressure. Murphy’s advice isn’t about avoiding conflict altogether. It’s about separating the emotional impulse to react from the decision of whether a reaction is actually worth having.
The option to respond harshly is always still there tomorrow. What’s rarely available is the ability to take back a reaction once it’s been sent.
What This Means for Startup Founders in Canada
Buffett’s reflection on Murphy offers a management style that’s especially relevant for early-stage leaders building inside the startup community in Toronto and across the country:
- Bring out the best in people, don’t extract it. The strongest managers create environments where people perform well voluntarily — not through pressure or long hours.
- Build in a delay before reacting. Giving yourself even one day before responding to a frustrating moment can prevent damage that’s difficult to undo.
- Restraint is a leadership skill, not a weakness. Holding back a reaction often takes more discipline than expressing it.
- Model the behavior you want from your team. Founders set the tone. A calm, measured response style filters down through the entire founder network around them.
Why This Matters for the Startup Ecosystem in Canada 🇨🇦
Early-stage companies live and die by their culture, and culture is shaped far more by how leaders behave under pressure than by what’s written in a values document. As the startup ecosystem in Canada continues to grow, founders who manage with the same restraint and people-first approach that Buffett describes in Murphy are the ones most likely to build teams that stay loyal through hard stretches.
Founders connected to a strong founder network also benefit from learning these kinds of lessons from people who’ve actually applied them — long before they have to learn them the hard way themselves.
Platforms like Startup Ecosystem Canada exist to help founders access this kind of operating wisdom early, building stronger leadership habits as their companies scale.
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