Page 84 - Ray Dalio - Principles

meritocracies of their own. So in 2006, I prepared a rough list
of about sixty Work Principles and distributed them to
Bridgewater’s managers so they could begin to evaluate them,

debate them, and make sense of them for themselves. “It’s a
rough draft,” I wrote in the covering memo, “but it is being put
out now for comments.”

This began an ongoing evolutionary process of
encountering many situations, forming principles about how to
deal with them, and getting in sync with other Bridgewater
leaders and managers about them. Over time, I encountered

most everything there is to encounter in running a company, so
I had a few hundred principles that covered most everything.
That collection of principles, like our collection of investment
principles, became a kind of decision-making library. Those
principles are the basis of what you’ll find in Work Principles.

But it wasn’t enough to codify and teach our philosophy;
we had to live it. 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