Principles

I admit I stayed away from reading this book when it first came out, not out of any negative feelings for Dalio, but more just from the obsession it engendered from the self-help crowd, which was a negative signal for me. After finally reading it, though, I realize this was a red herring. Partly the reason Dalio has been able to elicit such widespread readership of Principles is because of how simple he was able to distill these quite complex concepts of management and internal transparency, not because the concepts themselves were in any way diluted.

And so I stand corrected (and inspired). This book, of course, goes into quite a lot of detail about Dalio and Bridgewater’s concept and implementation of “radical transparency” in the workplace. But one area that I would ask those about to read the book pay special attention to is his writing on sharing the context of a given situation between multiple parties. This is one of the most deceptively challenging components of running any organization, and Dalio gets at the core of how to address some of the systematic causes of the problem.