Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

As the company grew bigger, how that happened evolved. In Bridgewater’s early days, everyone knew each other, so being radically transparent was easy—people could attend the meetings they wanted to and communicate with each other informally. But as we grew, that became logistically impossible, which was a real problem. How could people engage productively with the idea meritocracy if they didn’t know everything that was going on? Without transparency, people would spin whatever happened to suit their own interests, sometimes behind closed doors. Problems would be hidden instead of brought to the surface where they could be resolved. To have a real idea meritocracy, there must be transparency so that people can see things for themselves. To make sure this happened, I required that virtually all our meetings be recorded and made available to everyone, with extremely rare exceptions such as when we were discussing very private matters like personal health or proprietary information about a trade or decision rule. At first I sent these tapes of management meetings unedited to the entire company, but that was a huge burden on people’s time. So I built a small team to edit the tapes, focusing on the most important moments, and over time we added questions to create “virtual reality” case studies that could be used for training.6 Over time, these tapes became part of a “boot camp” for new employees as well as a window into an ongoing stream of situations connected to the principl...