Minus the middleman: Berkshire model offers profitable lessons

"Disintermediation" is the business phenomenon of the technology era, when consumers go straight to the source for everything from accommodations to crowd funding. Yet the greatest exemplar of the practice is the era's least technologically savvy company, Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire, 50 years old as a conglomerate and now one of America's largest public companies, almost never uses intermediaries — brokers, lenders, advisers, consultants and other staples of today's corporate bureaucracies. There are lessons in the model for the rest of corporate America, as well as investors.