My background is from the hedge fund investment side (though I have been programming since 1983 and have been increasingly involved in tech the past few years) and I have found these principles to be invaluable. I try to reread them a couple of times a year and in the past handed out copies to CEO and owner of the corporate partner of my startup fund.
There's a resonance here with Andy Grove's constructive confrontation and the kind of zero based idea they had about lines of business after realising mistake with memory vs cpu.
I think the main difficulties with it come from Dalio's insistence that everything is a machine - hunan beings, the family, the firm and the economy. I don't believe that is true - even code has an organic aspect to it, and firms are certainly organic.
And I think that shows in the difficulties he has with sustaining the principles as he steps away. If you read the comments on glass door, few complain about the principles but they do complain the principles aren't properly applied. So I think that's because he neglects the human aspect and if it's a cult if is insufficiently a cultus. (see TS Eliot).
Any approach can end up becoming a substrate for opportunistic and political behaviour. And most people aren't cut out for quite that level of directness.
But I learnt much more from Dalio than the stuff where I think he gets it wrong, and it's pretty powerful stuff because he has set out a coherent philosophy.
Charles G Koch has similar ideas about getting to the heart of things and bring critical. He says if a supervisor isn't being challenged by employees after a couple of years then he shouldn't be a supervisor - but the obligation is on both sides. See his books or YouTube interviews.
There's a resonance here with Andy Grove's constructive confrontation and the kind of zero based idea they had about lines of business after realising mistake with memory vs cpu.
I think the main difficulties with it come from Dalio's insistence that everything is a machine - hunan beings, the family, the firm and the economy. I don't believe that is true - even code has an organic aspect to it, and firms are certainly organic.
And I think that shows in the difficulties he has with sustaining the principles as he steps away. If you read the comments on glass door, few complain about the principles but they do complain the principles aren't properly applied. So I think that's because he neglects the human aspect and if it's a cult if is insufficiently a cultus. (see TS Eliot).
Any approach can end up becoming a substrate for opportunistic and political behaviour. And most people aren't cut out for quite that level of directness.
But I learnt much more from Dalio than the stuff where I think he gets it wrong, and it's pretty powerful stuff because he has set out a coherent philosophy.
Charles G Koch has similar ideas about getting to the heart of things and bring critical. He says if a supervisor isn't being challenged by employees after a couple of years then he shouldn't be a supervisor - but the obligation is on both sides. See his books or YouTube interviews.