Page 205 - Ray Dalio - Principles

This led to one of my most valuable management tools: Baseball Cards, which I mentioned
in the first part of this book. Just as a baseball card compiles the relevant data on a baseball
player, helping fans know what that player is good and bad at, I decided that it would be
similarly helpful for us to have cards for all of our players at Bridgewater.
In creating the attributes for our baseball cards, I used a combination of adjectives we
already used to describe people, like “conceptual,” “reliable,” “creative,” and “determined”;
the actions people took or didn’t take such as “holding others accountable” and “pushing
through to results”; and terms from personality tests such as “extroverted” or “judging.” Once
the cards were established, I created a process to have people evaluate each other, with the
people rated highest in each dimension (e.g., “most creative”) having more weight on the
ratings of other people in that dimension. People with proven track records in a certain area
would get more believability, or decision-making weight, within that area. By recording these
qualities in people’s Baseball Cards, others who’d never worked with them before could know
what to expect from them. When people changed, their rating would change. And when they
didn’t change, we were even more sure of what we could expect of them.
Naturally when I introduced this tool, people were skeptical or scared of it for various
reasons. Some were afraid that the cards would be inaccurate; others thought it would be
uncomfortable to have their weaknesses made so apparent, or that it would lead to their being
pigeonholed, inhibiting their growth; still others thought it would be too complex to be
practical. Imagine how you would feel if you were asked to force-rank all your colleagues on
creativity, determination, or reliability. Most people at first find that prospect frightening.

Still, I knew that we needed to be radically open in recording and considering what people
were like, and that things would eventually evolve to address people’s concerns if we were
sensible about how we approached the process. Today, most everyone at Bridgewater finds
these Baseball Cards to be essential, and we have built a whole suite of other tools, which will
be further described in Work Principles, to support our drive to understand what people are like
and who is believable at what.
I’ve already noted that our unique way of operating and the treasure trove of data we
accumulated brought us to the attention of some world-renowned organizational psychologists
and researchers. Bob Kegan of Harvard University, Adam Grant of the Wharton School, and
Ed Hess of the University of Virginia have written about us extensively, and I have learned a
great deal from them in turn. In a way I never intended, our trial-and-error discovery process
has put us at the cutting edge of academic thinking about personal development within
organizations. As Kegan wrote in his book An Everyone Culture, “from the individual
experience of probing in every one-on-one meeting, to the technologically integrated processes
for discussing . . . issues and baseball cards, to the company-wide practices of daily updates
and cases, Bridgewater has built an ecosystem to support personal development. The system
helps everyone in the company confront the truth about what everyone is like.”
Our journey of discovery has coincided with an incredibly fertile epoch in neuroscience,
when, thanks to rapid advances in brain imaging and the ability to gather and process big data,
our understanding has accelerated dramatically. As with all sciences on the cusp of
breakthroughs, I am sure that much of what is thought to be true today will soon be radically
improved. But what I do know is how incredibly beautiful and useful it is to understand how
the thinking machine between our ears works.
Here’s some of what I’ve learned:

The brain is even more complex than we can imagine. It has an estimated eighty-nine
billion tiny computers (called neurons) that are connected to each other through many trillions
of “wires” called axons and chemical synapses. As David Eagleman describes it in his
wonderful book Incognito:
Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia—hundreds of billions of them. Each one
of them is as complex as a city. . . . The cells [neurons] are connected in a network of such
staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of
mathematics. A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring