Principles

This week’s book summary is Principles by Ray Dalio.

Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the fifth most important private company in the United States (according to Forbes), does a stellar job in laying out his Personal History (for context), Life Principles, and Work Principles. I highly recommend this book to all business leaders. It is full of great business advice, leadership advice, personal advice, and practical application.

My takeaway from this book are the 16 Work Principles that Dalio describes in detail in the book (listed below for your reference):

• To Get the Culture Right
  1. Trust in radical truth and radical transparency
  2. Cultivate meaningful work and meaningful relationships
  3. Create a culture in which it is okay to make mistakes and unacceptable not to learn from them
  4. Get and stay in sync
  5. Believability weight your decision making
  6. Recognize how to get beyond disagreements
• To Get the People Right
  7. Remember that the WHO is more important than the WHAT
  8. Hire right, because the penalties for hiring wrong are huge
  9. Constantly train, test, evaluate, and sort people
• To Build and Evolve Your Machine
  10. Manage as someone operating a machine to achieve a goal
  11. Perceive and don’t tolerate problems
  12. Diagnose problems to get to their root causes
  13. Design improvements to your machine to get around your problems
  14. Do what you set out to do
  15. Use tools and protocols to shape how work is done
  16. And for heaven’s sake, don’t overlook governance!

Note that I have previously reviewed the following books in 2017:

1. Les McKeown’s Predictable Success
2. Exponential Organzations by Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and  Yuri van Geest
3. Smart Thinking by Art Markman
4. Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution
5. RG LeTourneau’s Mover of Men and Mountains
6. Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable
7. Ram Charan’s The Attacker’s Advantage
8. Jeff Goins’s The Art of Work
9. Ron Karr’s Lead, Sell, or Get Out of the Way
10. Timothy Ferriss’s Tools of Titans
11. Dr. David Perlmutter’s Grain Brain
12. Howard Schultz’z Onward
13. Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work
14. Jason Fried’s and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Remote
15. VALVE Employee Handbook
16. Dr. Mark Hyman’s The Ultramind Solution
17. Jeff Goin’s Real Artists Don’t Starve
18. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law
19. Dr. David Perlmutter’s Brain Maker
20. Jesse Tevelow’s The Connection Algorithm
21. Jesse Tevelow’s Hustle
22. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s Extreme Ownership
23. Shep Hyken’s Be Amazing or Go Home
24. Russell H. Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds

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