Page 90 - Ray Dalio - Principles

either. I felt that I, and the company more broadly, were
slipping from being pervasively excellent. From the get-go I
had toggled acceptably between investment management and

business management. But now that we were a bigger
company, the business management side was demanding much
more time than I had to give it. I conducted a time-and-motion
study of all of my investment and management
responsibilities; it showed it would take me about 165 hours a
week to achieve the level of excellence that I would be
satisfied with in overseeing both our investments and

management. That was obviously impossible. Since I wanted
to delegate as much as possible, I asked whether the things I
was doing could be done excellently by others, and if so, who
those others were. Everyone agreed that most of those areas
couldn’t adequately be delegated. I clearly hadn’t done a good
enough job of finding and training others to whom I could

delegate my responsibilities.

To me, the greatest success you can have as the person in
charge is to orchestrate others to do things well without you. A
step below that is doing things well yourself, and worst of all
is doing things poorly yourself. As I reflected on my position,
I could see that despite all of my and Bridgewater’s amazing
achievements, I had not achieved this highest level of success.

In fact, I was still struggling to achieve the second-highest
level (doing things well myself), even though Bridgewater was
extremely successful.

At the time, there were 738 people working at Bridgewater,
with fourteen department heads. I oversaw the department
heads, along with a Management Committee I’d created

because I knew I couldn’t trust myself to know what was best
without others probing me. I had structured the reporting lines
so that I both reported to the Management Committee and held
its members accountable for their oversight of the company. I
wanted them to also own the responsibility of producing
pervasive excellence and I wanted to be at their service in
helping them achieve it.

In May 2008, I wrote an email to the five members of the
Management Committee, copying the company, telling them
that “I am escalating to let you know that I have reached my