Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

Understand that a great manager is essentially an organizational engineer. Great managers are not philosophers, entertainers, doers, or artists. They are engineers. They see their organizations as machines and work assiduously to maintain and improve them. They create process-flow diagrams to show how the machine works and to evaluate its design.

When a case arises, I lay out the principles behind how I am handling it and get in sync with others to see if we agree on those principles or must modify them to make them better. By and large, that’s how all Bridgewater’s principles and policies were developed.

I ask each person who reports to me to take about ten to fifteen minutes to write a brief description of what they did that day, the issues pertaining to them, and their reflections. By reading these updates and triangulating them (i.e., seeing other people’s takes on what they are doing together), I can gauge how they are working together, what their moods are, and which threads I should pull on.

Interesting

The most effective leaders work to 1) open-mindedly seek out the best answers and 2) bring others along as part of that discovery process. That is how learning and getting in sync occurs. A truly great leader is appropriately uncertain but well equipped to deal with that uncertainty through open-minded exploration. All else being equal, I think the kind of leader who looks and acts like a skilled ninja will beat the kind of leader who looks and acts like a muscular action hero every time.

Don’t worry about whether or not your people like you and don’t look to them to tell you what you should do.

Hard to do

Authoritarian managers don’t develop their subordinates, which means those who report to them stay dependent. This hurts everyone in the long run. If you give too many orders, people will likely resent them, and when you aren’t looking, defy them. The greatest influence you can have over intelligent people—and the greatest influence they will have on you—comes from constantly getting in sync about what is true and what is best so that you all want the same things.

Most people would rather celebrate all the things that are going well while sweeping problems under the rug. Those people have their priorities exactly backward, and there is little that can be more harmful to an organization.

11.4 Don’t be afraid to fix the difficult things. In some cases, people accept unacceptable problems because they are perceived as too difficult to fix. Yet fixing unacceptable problems is a lot easier than not fixing them, because not fixing them will lead to more stress, more work, and chronic bad outcomes that could get you fired. So remember one of the first principles of management: You need to look at the feedback you’re getting on your machine and either fix your problems or escalate them, if need be, over and over again. There is no easier alternative than bringing problems to the surface and putting them in the hands of good problem solvers.

I started with my mental map of how things should’ve gone—based on the machine I’d built—and asked the new managers to describe what had actually happened.

He really thinks of it as a machine

A drill-down takes place in two steps and is then followed by design and execution steps. If done well, the two drill-down steps can be done in about four hours.

them.Whenever I make an investment decision, I observe myself making it and think about the criteria I used. I ask myself how I would handle another one of those situations and write down my principles for doing so. Then I turn them into algorithms. I am now doing the same for management and I have gotten in the habit of doing it for all my decisions.

Sums it up

In nature, cleansing storms are big infrequent events that clear out all the overgrowth that’s accumulated during good times. Forests need these storms to be healthy—without them, there would be more weak trees and a buildup of overgrowth that stifles other growth. The same is true for companies. Bad times that force cutbacks so only the strongest and most essential employees (or companies) survive are inevitable and can be great, even though they seem terrible at the time.

The best approach I’ve seen for doing this is what companies and organizations like GE, 3G, and the Chinese Politburo do, which is to build a pyramid-like “succession pipeline” in which the next generation of leaders is exposed to the thinking and decision making of the current leaders so they can both learn and be tested.

Don’t assume that people are operating in your interest rather than their own. A higher percentage of the population than you might imagine will cheat if given the opportunity.

Scary but I believe it.

Leverage in an organization is not unlike leverage in the markets; you’re looking for ways to achieve more with less. At Bridgewater, I typically work at about 50:1 leverage, meaning that for every hour I spend with each person who works for me, they spend about fifty hours working to move the project along.

Curious how he knows what the number is.

If nothing bad is happening to you now, wait a bit and it will. That is just reality. My approach to life is that it is what it is and the important thing is for me to figure out what to do about it and not spend time moaning about how I wish it were different.

To produce real behavioral change, understand that there must be internalized or habituated learning. Thankfully, technology has made internalized learning much easier today than it was when books were the primary way of conveying knowledge. Don’t get me wrong, the book was a powerful invention. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press allowed easy dissemination of knowledge that helped people build on each other’s learnings. But experiential learning is so much more powerful. Now that technology makes it so easy to create experiential/virtual learning, I believe that we are on the brink of another step-change improvement in the quality of learning that will be as great as or even greater than Gutenberg’s.

Is he saying VR/AR is about to transform the book?

Since we tape virtually all our meetings, we have been able to create virtual learning case studies that allow everyone to participate without actually being in the room. People see the meeting transpire as though they were in it, and then the case study pauses and asks them for their own thinking on the matter at hand.

This is fascinating.

of all approaches to decision making, an idea meritocracy is the best.40 It’s almost too obvious to warrant saying, but I will anyway: Knowing what you can and cannot expect from each person and knowing what to do to make sure the best ideas win out are the best way to make decisions. Idea-meritocratic decision making is better than traditional autocratic or democratic decision making in almost all cases.

Good summary

Because there are too many principles for anyone to keep top of mind enough to apply appropriately to whatever situation they face, and because it’s easier to ask for advice than to seek it out in a book, I created Coach. Coach’s platform is populated with a library of common situations, or “ones of those” (e.g., disagreeing with an assessment someone made, someone lied or did something unethical, etc.), which are linked to the relevant principles to help people handle them.

Is this like a search engine for the tenets? After reading this book, I definitely feel like I need one - there is far too much to remember.

The Dot Collector is an app used in meetings that allows people to express their thoughts and see others’ thoughts in real time, and then helps them collectively reach an idea-meritocratic decision. It surfaces people’s thinking, analyzes it, and uses the information to help people make real-time decisions better in a few ways.

In addition to collecting “dots” about people in meetings, we collect data on our people in numerous other ways (reviews, tests, the choices people make, etc.). All these dots are analyzed via computerized algorithms based on stress-tested logic in order to create pointillist pictures of what people are like. That logic is typically shared with and vetted by the people in the company to help its objectivity and believability. We then capture these pictures in Baseball Cards, which are a simple way of presenting a person’s strengths and weaknesses and the evidence behind them (in much the same way as a baseball card does for a professional baseball player).

For years, I have asked each person who reports to me to take about ten to fifteen minutes to write a brief email of what they did that day, the issues pertaining to them, and their reflections. By reading these updates and triangulating them (in other words, seeing different people’s takes on what they are doing), I can gauge how they are working together, what their moods are, and which threads I should pull. Over the last few years, I’ve developed this into a software application that pulls these updates into a dashboard, which makes them much easier to track, record metrics, and respond to than dealing with dozens of separate email threads. It also allows people to easily provide helpful data—like their morale, how heavy their workload is, issues they want to escalate—on a daily basis. I and those I work with find this simple tool invaluable in helping us stay in sync. Also, at the company level, it provides valuable information for taking the daily pulse of what’s going on (morale, workloads, specific issues, who is doing what, etc.).

Fascinating. Many people would object to overhead of this, but I'd love to learn more.