Page 466 - Ray Dalio - Principles

believability without having to remember who is more
believable at what.

BASEBALL CARDs

In addition to collecting “dots” about people in meetings, we

collect data on our people in numerous other ways (reviews,
tests, the choices people make, etc.). All these dots are
analyzed via computerized algorithms based on stress-tested
logic in order to create pointillist pictures of what people are
like. That logic is typically shared with and vetted by the

people in the company to help its objectivity and believability.
We then capture these pictures in Baseball Cards, which are a
simple way of presenting a person’s strengths and weaknesses
and the evidence behind them (in much the same way as a
baseball card does for a professional baseball player).

I found that we needed to have these and refer to them
regularly because without them, people tended to interact with

each other without any regard to who was good or bad at what.
For example, Baseball Cards are useful in meetings, where
they allow people to assess the qualities of whoever is
expressing a point of view to determine the merit of that
opinion. As a supplement to Baseball Cards, we developed
another tool called the People Profile, which takes all the data
from Baseball Cards (which have grown complex over time)

to provide a simple, text-based summary of what each person
is like. Over time, this is meant to provide employees with a
systemized synthesis that captures Bridgewater’s best thinking
about what someone is like. We work with the people being
assessed to compare these pictures with the assessed person’s
own perceptions. In this way of seeking alignment between the

process and the person’s self-perception, both the processes
and the confidences in the perceptions are improved.

In order to match people to jobs, I developed the
Combinator, which takes the data from the Baseball Cards
and allows one to look at people based on their key attributes
and compare them to one another. If you’re looking for a

certain type of person to fill a role, you can enter a few names
of people who fit the image, and the Combinator will call up