Build the organization around goals rather than tasks.
If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy – if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.
Know what your people are like and what makes them tick, because your people are your most important resource. Develop a full profile of each person’s values, abilities, and skills. These qualities are the real drivers of behavior, so knowing them in detail will tell you which jobs a person can and cannot do well, which ones they should avoid, and how the person should be trained.
Learn how much confidence to have in your people – don’t assume it. No manager should delegate responsibilities to people they don’t know well.
Most people assume that the challenges that go along with growing a large business are greater than those of growing a smaller one. That is not true. Going from a five-person organization to a sixty-person organization was just as challenging as going from a sixty-person organization to a seven-hundred-person organization – and from a seven-hundred-person organization to a 1,500-person one.
Clearly assign responsibilities. Eliminate any confusion about expectations and ensure that people view their failures to complete their tasks and achieve their goals as personal failures.
Keep your strategic vision the same while making appropriate tactical changes as circumstances dictate.
Recognize that having an effective idea meritocracy requires that you understand the merit of each person’s ideas.
Focus more on making the pie bigger than on exactly how to slice it.
Avoid fixating on irrelevant details.
Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal. Our overriding objective is excellence and constant improvement at Bridgewater. To be clear, it is not to make lots of money. The natural extension of this is not that you should be happy with little money. On the contrary – you should expect to make a lot. If we operate consistently with this philosophy we should be productive and the company should do well financially. There is comparatively little age- and seniority-based hierarchy.
To visualize what I mean by “shaping” and “shapers,” think of Steve Jobs, who was probably the greatest and most iconic shaper of our time, as measured by the size and success of his shaping.
I have come to realize that bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons, and not just about business but also about relationships. One has many more supposed friends when one is up than when one is down, because most people like to be with winners and shun losers. True friends are the opposite.
Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement.
Remember that everyone has opinions and they are often bad. Opinions are easy to produce; everyone has plenty of them and most people are eager to share them – even to fight for them. Unfortunately many are worthless or even harmful, including a lot of your own.
Find the most believable people possible who disagree with you and try to understand their reasoning.
Don’t get distracted by shiny objects.
In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time.
You must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true.
Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that.