Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Alex Malley for LinkedIn Pulse. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here.

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It is my belief that the fanfare and fuss surrounding a leader’s achievements often overshadows how they reached and maintained their position at the summit of success.

There is a cult of personality around Warren Buffett, the revered, even fabled chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway. It is not something he has cultivated, but his billions of dollars no doubt fuel a large measure of interest. If you fall for all the hoopla, you miss the real Warren Buffett – a leader in business and the community virtually without peer.

The tens of thousands of shareholders in his company, attending their annual meeting at CenturyLink Center in Omaha, Nebraska, are not fooled. They all know about what I like to describe as A.I.L.C. – or the four states of Warren Buffett.

[Here are the first and last of four “states.”]

Authenticity

People respond to authenticity: they need to know that a leader is everything they seem to be. They recoil from baseless bravado and overblown promise. In today’s society, all leaders are on a watching brief.

So, in our era of suspicion and scepticism, that there is a competitive process for the 30,000 places at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting is clear evidence of Warren Buffett’s genuine, real connection with the people and of the high regard in which he is held.

Executive management and directors tend to approach these meetings as highly scripted and defensive affairs, with questions and answers anticipating every possible shareholder accusation or complaint.

In contrast, Warren Buffett hires an entire stadium and conference centre for three days. There is a steak night at his favourite restaurant, picnics and shopping days. And when it comes to engagement with shareholders, there is six hours of unscripted, nothing off-limits interaction. It is the definition of a positive conversation between management and shareholders. It is a celebration rather than an interrogation. It is interaction at a human level.

Community

Real leaders are not takers. For them, success is not about accumulation, it is about how you made your community a better place. How you stimulated positive views, encouraged people to be better and supported those who needed it.

It is clear to me that the essence of Warren Buffett is not money. Whether he is lobbying President Obama to change unfair tax laws that see him paying only 19 per cent tax, when his staff are paying more than 30 per cent, or committing 85 per cent of his fortune to support the lifesaving research and biotechnology work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the essence of Warren Buffett is giving back to the community.

So the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway are not taken in by the fanfare that accompanies one of the world’s richest people. Sure, like him, they are about returns, but they know he is no different now to when he was a boy building his first business. They respect and accept his thinking, and his trust in and his delegation to others.

It appears to me, that money is a by-product of his passion, rather than the core of his focus. Therein lies an extraordinary lesson for those young and ambitious people who are at that stage perhaps of being blinded by “success”. It comes with passion and focus, not from a quick trade.

Old fashioned values of loyalty, decency and trust – so much a part of my grandfather’s era – are worth more today than ever before and I suspect are the true source of Warren Buffett’s wealth.

At a time where the United States appears to live in the moment, when once it had the vision to land on the moon, it prompts me to consider Warren Buffett – not the billionaire, but the man who built a culture that will be his succession plan. He reminds the world, and the United States in particular, that traditional values build hard working and big thinking economies. It is time we paused to reflect on this.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Alex Malley FCPA is the chief executive of CPA Australia and the host of the Nine Network television series The Bottom Line. Alex is also a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and he is a regular business commentator on the nationally syndicated programs The Money News on 2GB and Sky News Business. Follow Alex on Twitter.

To those who wish to learn a great deal more about Warren Buffett, I recommend these three sources:

Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Carol Loomis’ Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2013

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America, Third Edition, Edited by Lawrence A. Cunningham