This article on the chaos at the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, starts with an all-staff email from the founder Ray Dalio.
“There’s piss on the floor.”
Not the kind of email you’d expect from a billionaire founder of fund managing more than $200 billion US dollars. But it didn’t stop with his first email. From there, the matter exploded within Bridgewater.
“That puddle of urine on the bathroom would be the subject of one of these cases. Dalio summoned the hedge fund’s head of facilities for questioning. Staff were assigned to a rotating guard, standing outside the restroom to take notes on all who entered — and whether they left clean floors. After each visitor, a member of the cleaning crew would rush in to mop. New urinals were brought in for testing. Stickers were applied to the porcelain to give men a more effective target. Then the exact placement of the stickers was probed.”
None of this is what you’d expect from Ray Dalio. Especially if you’ve read his book, Principles. But, as it turns out, at Bridgewater recently there’s been plenty of things you wouldn’t expect.
This is an organisation where staff are given iPads and directed to rate their colleagues from one-to-ten multiple times a day. In meetings, they often take real-time polls on whether a speaker is right or wrong. And they also often vote on who should be fired.
Dalio thinks of this as a culture of radical transparency. To us, it just seems like a recipe for a paranoid workforce. But hey, we’re not the ones managing $200 billion.
This article takes a collection of weird moments from within the walls of Bridgewater. And it focuses on Dalio’s attempt to turn his book Principles: Life and Work into software that could be used to manage employees throughout the Bridgewater offices. As you can imagine, it doesn’t turn out as you’d expect.
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