Daljit Dhadwal

Recently, both New York and The New Yorker profiled Ray Dalio. Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates. Bridgewater runs the world’s largest hedge fund. Both articles provide fascinating and quite entertaining glimpses into the corporate culture at Bridgewater. Both articles, but the one in New York more so, focus on a document Dalio wrote explaining his management (and life) philosophy.

From New York magazine:

A corporate gospel isn’t novel—The Bloomberg Way was required reading for Bloomberg News employees years before Dalio set down his ideas. But Principles is no mere training manual. The first half of the book, “My Most Fundamental Principles,” contains Dalio’s abridged autobiography, an apologia for radical transparency, and a step-by-step guide to “personal evolution.” The precepts in this section—many of them written in a digressive, self-serious style that reads as if Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra had collaborated on a line of fortune cookies—are never about making money, at least not openly. They’re about following rules, learning from mistakes, reaching your goals. Doing things in the Bridgewater way is thought to be the best—and possibly only—way of achieving these objectives.

Links to the articles:

New York: The Billion-Dollar Aphorisms of Hedge Fund Cult Leader Ray Dalio
The New Yorker: Mastering the Machine: How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund

Dalio has posted his Principles (a 123 page PDF) on the Bridgewater Associates website.