by Ray Dalio

You can rarely get a candid look into the life and work of such an accomplished person like Ray Dalio. Even more interesting than his personal story (which all have a bit of survivorship bias) are the principles which he’s been following to build his outstanding company, Bridgewater.

The beginning takes us through his early life and circumstances. This part was reminiscent of Edward Thorp’s autobiography “A Man For All Markets” – there are certainly some parallels.

I won’t retell any of the principles here, he’s making a great job of it himself by providing bullet points, short descriptions and a summary.

What jumped out to me the most was his notion of the “culture of excellence” – being aware and proactive about making all the aspects of an activity excellent. Dalio describes how to look out for and solve problems to achieve it, and this process is, in its essence, kaizen, or continuous improvement on all levels. He never mentions kaizen or Toyota (which popularized the practice in business), but the tools and practices he outlines in his principles are similar. But, to think of it, isn’t continuous striving for excellence a prerequisite of success?

Overall, the life principles section, though thought provoking, left me mostly dispassionate. I think that the real goldmine are the work principles. All aspects of effective management and decision making are precisely dissected and presented to the reader in a digested, easy to understand way. Remember that Dalio has spent decades designing them! Of course, what’s in the book is just a taste of what is actually used, but still his approach to designing and running a company is refreshing and utterly logical.

Another surprising thing was how I caught an echo of Dalio’s words the other day when watching “The incredible inventions of intuitive AI”. Maurice Conti (the presenter) describes human tools throughout history as passive in the sense that a human must always control them. After that he proposes tools which are intuitive, or proactive, which provide the necessary information or perform actions without the human having to fully control them. This is exactly what Dalio says about internal Bridgewater tools which help manage the company (like the Dot Connector), adding that he strongly believes in the future, where machines proactively augment the humans’ decisions. What an interesting coincidence!