I thought it was interesting that Berkshire intentionally hasn't harmonized its systems across subsidiaries. It reminded me of one of Taleb's ideas on robustness from his book Antifragile, where he argues that a system of individually managed municipalities would be more robust than an economy with a single central government because system failure would tend to only affect isolated parts of the overall population at any single point in time.
That goes hand-in-hand with how simple Berkshire's home-office system is, right? It seems like, by design, BH itself does as little as possible. It runs out of a small office suite with something like 30 people. That system can't be harmonized across companies like Geico and Gen Re, even before you realize that those companies run alongside a furniture store and a jeweler.
