Page 445 - Ray Dalio - Principles

with authority. My ideal is to have a process in which
everyone contributes criteria for good decision making and
those criteria are assessed and selected by appropriately

assigned (believable) people. If people maintain the right
balance of open-mindedness and assertiveness so they
understand where they are and aren’t believable to make
decisions, having these open discussions on the criteria for
assessing and managing people can be very powerful in
building and reinforcing the idea meritocracy.

We have early-stage tools that achieve these things and we

are striving to refine them so that our people management
system operates as effectively as our investment management
system.

Even with its imperfections, our evidence-based approach
to learning about people, guiding them, and sorting them is
much fairer and more effective than the arbitrary and
subjective management systems that most organizations still

rely on. I believe that the forces of evolution will push most
organizations toward systems that combine human and
computer intelligence to program principles into algorithms
that substantially improve decision making.

In the Appendix, I’ve provided detailed descriptions of a
number of the tools and protocols that support this idea-

meritocratic approach and reinforce the behaviors that people
need to operate consistently with it. They are designed to help
us achieve our goals of 1) learning what people are like, 2)
sharing what people are like, 3) providing personalized
training and development, 4) offering guidance and oversight
in specific situations, and 5) helping managers sort people into
the right roles or out of the company based on what they are
like and what is required.

You don’t need to use these same tools and protocols for
your own idea meritocracy, but you should have ways of
producing the internalized learning that it will require. While
ours have evolved a lot, yours don’t have to be as fancy or
automated. For example, providing a form or a template to
help guide people through the steps required for them to

manage their work or carry out a process will yield better