Review: Principles: Life and Work

Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: Organisational Leadership 101

Ray Dalio built one of the esteemed Financial institutions in the world - Bridgewater and he breaks the book into three parts - his journey , his principles at an individual level and then at an organisational level.

His journey is no doubt interesting, the principles at individual level are regular things you read in self help books these days. What added uniqueness for me was my firest read at organisational principles from someone who built an otganisation from scratch. Upto 70 employees, he knew them on first name basis and interviewed and hired - beyond that he had to build a structure. Jeff Bezos had a similar set up having interviewed upto 200 folks personally in Amazon and then had to codify his principles for the organisation to scale.

From getting people right, culture right and allow it to evolve, being radically open minded from a personal angle to understanding people are wired differently are couple of the extremely high level pointers in the book. He drills down to what he means and how to navigate . Key areas such as how do you effectively disagree and take a decision, how to not tolerate a problem, set goals and work towards them. There is a wide array of topics he covers and form a basic grounding for someone learning the 101 of leadership in an large organisational setting especially.

Tough love as a leader , building meaningful relationships focused on company culture whilst - consistently evaluating the system one has built to measure up in a dynamic environment, there are a lot of practical pointers he shares that would resonate. I did love the baseball cards analogy of having individuals come up with their 3 traits that can help team members know each other better and perform better in a team by syncing up and complementing their strengths.

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