Page 305 - Ray Dalio - Principles

comes to integrity, I don’t view it in a black-white, one-strike-
and-you’re-out way. I look at the severity, the circumstances,
and the patterns to try to understand whether I am dealing with

a person who is a habitual liar and will lie to me again, or with
a person who is fundamentally honest yet imperfect. I consider
the significance of the dishonesty itself (Was the person
stealing a piece of cake or were they committing a felony?) as
well as the nature of our existing relationship (Is it my spouse
telling the lie, a casual acquaintance, or an employee?).
Treating such cases differently is appropriate because a basic

law of justice is that the punishment should fit the crime.

1.4 Be radically transparent.

If you agree that a real idea meritocracy is an extremely
powerful thing, it should not be a great leap for you to see that
giving people the right to see things for themselves is better
than forcing them to rely on information processed for them
by others. Radical transparency forces issues to the surface—
most importantly (and most uncomfortably) the problems that

people are dealing with and how they’re dealing with them—
and it allows the organization to draw on the talents and
insights of all its members to solve them. Eventually, for
people who get used to it, living in a culture of radical
transparency is more comfortable than living in the fog of not
knowing what’s going on and not knowing what people really

think. And it is incredibly effective. But, to be clear, like most
great things it also has drawbacks. Its biggest drawback is that
it is initially very difficult for most people to deal with
uncomfortable realities. If unmanaged, it can lead to people
getting involved with more things than they should, and can
lead people who aren’t able to weigh all the information to
draw the wrong conclusions.

For example, bringing all an organization’s problems to the
surface and regarding every one of them as intolerable may
lead some people to wrongly conclude that their organization
has more intolerable problems than another organization that
keeps its issues under wraps. Yet which organization is more