Page 364 - Ray Dalio - Principles

While we talked about an organization’s culture in the last
section, its people are even more important because they can
change the culture for better or for worse. A culture and its
people are symbiotic—the culture attracts certain kinds of

people and the people in turn either reinforce or evolve the
culture based on their values and what they’re like. If you
choose the right people with the right values and remain in
sync with them, you will play beautiful jazz together. If you
choose the wrong people, you will all go over the waterfall
together.

Steve Jobs, who everyone thought was the secret to Apple’s

success, said, “The secret to my success is that we’ve gone to
exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world.” I
explain this concept in the next chapter, Remember That the
WHO Is More Important than the WHAT. Anyone who runs a
successful organization will tell you the same.

Yet most organizations are bad at recruiting. It starts with

interviewers picking people they like and who are like them
instead of focusing on what people are really like and how
well they will fit in their jobs and careers. As I describe in
Chapter Eight, Hire Right, Because the Penalties for Hiring
Wrong Are Huge, to hire well, one needs a more scientific
process that precisely matches people’s values, abilities, and
skills with the organization’s culture and its career paths. You
and your candidate need to get to know each other. You have

to let them interview your organization and you have to
honestly convey to them what it’s like, warts and all, and be
crystal clear about what you can expect from each other.

But even then, after you both say yes, you won’t know if
you have a good fit until you’ve lived together in your work
and your relationships for a while. The “interviewing” process

doesn’t end when employment begins, but transitions into a
rigorous process of training, testing, sorting, and most
importantly, getting in sync, which I describe in Chapter Nine,
Constantly Train, Test, Evaluate, and Sort People.

I believe that the ability to objectively self-assess, including
one’s own weaknesses, is the most influential factor in