Page 287 - Ray Dalio - Principles

While operating this way might sound difficult and
inefficient, it is actually extremely efficient. In fact, it is much
harder and much less efficient to work in an organization in
which most people don’t know what their colleagues are really
thinking. Also, when people can’t be totally open, they can’t
be themselves. As Harvard developmental psychologist Bob

Kegan, who has studied Bridgewater, likes to say, in most
companies people are doing two jobs: their actual job and the
job of managing others’ impressions of how they’re doing
their job. For us, that’s terrible. We’ve found that bringing
everything to the surface 1) removes the need to try to look
good and 2) eliminates time required to guess what people are

thinking. In doing so, it creates more meaningful work and
more meaningful relationships.

Here are the forces behind Bridgewater’s self-reinforcing
evolutionary spiral:

1. We went from one independent thinker who wanted to
achieve audacious goals to a group of independent
thinkers who wanted to achieve audacious goals.

2. To enable these independent thinkers to have effective
collective decision making, we created an idea
meritocracy based on principles that ensured we would
be radically honest and transparent with each other, have
thoughtful disagreements, and have idea-meritocratic
ways of getting past our disagreements to make
decisions.

3. We recorded these decision-making principles on paper
and later encoded them into computers and made our
decisions based on them.

4. This produced our successes and failures, which produced
more learnings, which were written into more principles
that were systemized and acted upon.

5. This process resulted in excellent work and excellent
relationships that led us to having well-rewarded and

happy employees and clients.