Page 86 - Ray Dalio - Principles

exploring differences. But eventually I found a few great
people, especially a psychologist named Bob Eichinger, who
pointed me to a number of other very useful tests.

In early 2008, I had most of Bridgewater’s managers take

the Myers-Briggs assessment. The results astounded me. I
couldn’t believe that some of them actually thought in the
ways the test described, yet when I asked them to rate how
well it described them on a scale of one to five, more than 80
percent of them gave it a four or five.

CREATING BASEBALL CARDS

Even after we were armed with the Myers-Briggs data and
other tests we’d taken, I found that we were still having a hard

time connecting the dots between the outcomes that we were
seeing and what we knew about the people producing them.
Over and over again, the same people would walk into the
same meetings, do things the same ways, and get the same
results without seeking to understand why. (Recently I came
across a study that revealed a cognitive bias in which people

consistently overlook the evidence of one person being better
than another at something and assume that both are equally
good at a task. This was exactly what we were seeing.) For
example, people who were known not to be creative were
being assigned tasks that required creativity; people who
didn’t pay attention to details were being assigned to detail-
oriented jobs, and so on. We needed a way to make the data

that showed what people were like even clearer and more
explicit, so I began making “Baseball Cards” for employees
that listed their “stats.” The idea was that they could be passed
around and referred to when assigning responsibilities. Just as
you wouldn’t have a great fielder with a .160 batting average
bat third, you wouldn’t assign a big-picture person a task

requiring attention to details.

At first, this idea met a lot of resistance. People were
concerned that the Baseball Cards wouldn’t be accurate, that
producing them would be too time-consuming, and that they
would only succeed in pigeonholing people unfairly. But over