Page 369 - Ray Dalio - Principles

The same goes for yourself. If your designer/manager-you
doesn’t have a good reason to be confident that your worker-
you is up to a given task, it would be crazy to let yourself do

the task without seeking the supervision of believable parties.
You know that there are a lot of incompetent people in the
world trying to do things they’re not good at, so the chances
are good that you are one of them. That’s just a reality and it’s
okay for you to accept it and deal with it in a way that
produces good outcomes.

a. Understand that the most important RPs are those responsible for the goals,
outcomes, and machines at the highest levels. Give me someone who
can be responsible for an entire area—someone who can
design, hire, and sort to achieve the goal—and I can be
comfortable things will go well. These are the most important
people to choose and manage well. Senior managers must be
capable of higher-level thinking, and understand the difference
between goals and tasks—otherwise you will have to do their

jobs for them. The ability to see and value goals is largely
innate, though it improves with experience. It can be tested
for, though no tests are perfect.

7.2 Know that the ultimate

Responsible Party will be the
person who bears the

consequences of what is done.

So long as you bear the consequences of failure, you are the

ultimate Responsible Party. For example, while you might
choose to delegate the responsibility of figuring out how to
handle your illness to a doctor, it is your responsibility to pick
the right one, since you will bear the consequences if he does a
bad job. Or if you were building a house, would you go to an
architect and say “show me the kinds of houses I can build” or
would you tell the architect what kind of house you want to
live in? This is especially true when it comes to money. If you

delegate the oversight responsibility for your finances to
others, they typically won’t hold themselves as accountable for