Ray Dalio is a Billionaire who founded the Hedgefund Bridgewater. His company got a lot of attention when, during the housing crisis of 2008 to 2009, his shareholders were profiting. When attention fell on his company, they were intrigued by the honesty first work ethic and other quirky things like employees wearing baseball cards with their personality traits and skills on them.

Ray Dalio decided to write a book explaining his story, his work ethic and company culture. That book is called Principles.

In the second half of Ray Dalio’s book Principles (Click here for the first half), he discussed 16 work principles that he uses to help keep his hedgefund Bridgewater running now that he is stepping down from leadership.

An organization is a machine consisting of two major parts: culture and people.

a. A great organization has both great people and a great culture.

b. Great people have both great character and great capabilities.

c. Great cultures bring problems and disagreements to the surface and solve them well, and they love imagining and building great things that haven’t been build before.

Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships.

A believability-weighted idea meritocracy is the best system for making effective decisions.

Make your passion and your work one and the same and do it with people you want to be with.

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

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

10. Manage as Someone Operating a Machine to Achieve a Goal

11. Perceive and Don’t Tolerate Problems

12. Diagnose Problems to Get at 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!