miguel-se7

Reading Principles proved to be a pretty bittersweet experience. As a book, it is pretty bad, being very long and highly repetitive; however, the ideas presented are valuable enough to warrant a read.

The idea behind the book is pretty simple, billionaire Ray Dalio tell us the story about how he founded Bridgewater and the key principles that ensured its success.

Ray believes the best way to run a company is through and idea meritocracy, the power residing in the reasoning, not the position of the individuals. To achieve this you need 'Radical Transparency' and 'Radical open-mindedness', meaning that you need to make most information available to your employees, and that people should be more focused on finding what is true and how to achieve the goal rather than arguing over who is right.

Over the course of the book we learn about the different techniques used at Bridgewater in order to maintain their high standards, such as using personality test to asses their employees, having 'baseball cards' for each person displaying their skills, as well as Ray's 5 step process to get what you want out of life:

“1. Have clear goals. 2. Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of your achieving those goals. 3. Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes. 4. Design plans that will get you around them. 5. Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results.”

Overall the book provides some good advice, as it seems to have helped Ray achieves his goal as he steps down from his role in Bridgewater

“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.”

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