Page 469 - Ray Dalio - Principles

meritocracy. Otherwise the person with greater power could
pull rank on the person with lesser power.

We also have a number of tools that help us complete and
oversee our day-to-day work and stay in sync regarding how

things are going.

DAILY UPDATE TOOL

For years, I have asked each person who reports to me to take
about ten to fifteen minutes to write a brief email of what they
did that day, the issues pertaining to them, and their
reflections. By reading these updates and triangulating them

(in other words, seeing different people’s takes on what they
are doing), I can gauge how they are working together, what
their moods are, and which threads I should pull. Over the last
few years, I’ve developed this into a software application that
pulls these updates into a dashboard, which makes them much
easier to track, record metrics, and respond to than dealing

with dozens of separate email threads. It also allows people to
easily provide helpful data—like their morale, how heavy their
workload is, issues they want to escalate—on a daily basis. I
and those I work with find this simple tool invaluable in
helping us stay in sync. Also, at the company level, it provides
valuable information for taking the daily pulse of what’s going
on (morale, workloads, specific issues, who is doing what,

etc.).

CONTRACT TOOL

How often have you ended a meeting with everybody saying
we should do this or that, but then everybody walks off and
nothing actually happens because people lose track of what
was agreed upon? Implicit contracts are pretty much
worthless; the commitments people make to each other need to

be explicit to be actionable—and firm enough to hold each
other accountable. The Contract Tool is a simple app that lets
people make and monitor their commitments to each other. It
helps both the people who requested things, and those who are
required to provide those things, to easily stay on top of them.