Page 338 - Ray Dalio - Principles

l. Leverage your communication. While open communication is very
important, the challenge is to do it in a time-efficient way—you
can’t have individual conversations with everyone. It is helpful
to identify easy ways of sharing, like open emails posted on an

FAQ board or sending around videotapes or audio recordings
of key meetings. (I call such approaches “leverage.”) The
challenges become greater the higher you go in the reporting
hierarchy because the number of people affected by your
actions and who also have opinions and/or questions grows so
large. In such cases, you will need even greater leverage and
prioritization (for example by having some of the questions
answered by a well-equipped party who works for you or by

asking people to prioritize their questions by urgency or
importance).

4.5 Great collaboration feels like

playing jazz.

In jazz, there’s no script: You have to figure things out as you
go along. Sometimes you need to sit back and let others drive
things; other times, you blare it out yourself. To do the right
thing at the right moment you need to really listen to the people
you’re playing with so that you can understand where they’re

going.
All great creative collaboration should feel the same way.

Combining your different skills like different instruments,
improvising creatively, and at the same time subordinating
yourself to the goals of the group leads to playing great music
together. But it’s important to keep in mind what number of
collaborators will play well together: A talented duo can
improvise beautifully, as can a trio or quartet. But gather ten

musicians and no matter how talented they are, it’s probably
going to be too many unless they’re carefully orchestrated.

a. 1+1=3. Two people who collaborate well will be about three
times as effective as each of them operating independently,
because each will see what the other might miss—plus they can
leverage each other’s strengths while holding each other
accountable to higher standards.