Those meetings were painful for everyone. Because no one was clear about what they were good or bad at, everybody expressed opinions about everything and there wasn’t any sensible way of sorting through them. We discussed why the group was failing, which led us to see that the individuals Bob had chosen for his team reflected his own strengths and weaknesses in their own roles. While that took frankness and open-mindedness and was a big step forward, it wasn’t recorded and systematically converted into adequate changes, so the same people kept making the same sort of mistakes, over and over again.

Isn’t it obvious that our different ways of thinking, our emotional responses, and our not having ways of dealing with them is crippling us? What are we supposed to do, not deal with them?

I’m sure you’ve been in contentious disagreements before—ones where people have different points of view and can’t agree on what’s right. Good people with good intentions get angry and emotional; it is frustrating and often becomes personal. Most companies avoid this by suppressing open debate and having those with the most authority simply make the calls. I didn’t want that kind of company. I knew we needed to dig more deeply into what was preventing us from working together more effectively, bring those things to the surface, and explore them.

Bridgewater’s roughly 1,500 employees do many different things—some strive to understand the global markets; others develop technologies; still others serve clients, manage health insurance and other benefits for employees, provide legal guidance, manage IT and facilities, and so on. All these activities require different types of people to work together in ways that harvest the best ideas and throw away the worst. Organizing people to complement their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses is like conducting an orchestra. It can be magnificent if done well and terrible if done poorly.
