No matter what path you choose to follow, your organization is a machine made up of culture and people that will interact to produce outcomes, and those outcomes will provide feedback about how well your organization is working. Learning from this feedback should lead you to modify the culture and the people so your organizational machine improves.

This dynamic is so important that I’ve organized Work Principles around it in three sections: To Get the Culture Right, To Get the People Right, and To Build and Evolve Your Machine. Each chapter within these sections begins with a higher-level principle. Reading these will give you a good sense of the main concepts in each chapter.

Under these higher-level principles there are a number of supporting principles built around the many different types of decisions that need to be made. These principles are meant for reference. Though you might want to skim through them, I recommend using them as one would use an encyclopedia or search engine to answer a specific question. For example, if you have to fire (or transfer) someone, you should use the Table of Principles and go to the section of principles about that. To make this easier, at Bridgewater we created a tool called the “Coach” that allows people to type in their particular issue and find the appropriate principles to help them with it.37 I will soon be making that available to the public, along with many of the other management tools you’ll read about in the final section of the book.

My main objective is not to sell you on these principles but to share the most valuable lessons I’ve learned over my more than forty-year journey. My goal is to get you to think hard about the tough tradeoffs that you will face in many types of situations. By thinking about the tradeoffs behind the principles, you will be able to decide for yourself which principles are best for you.

This brings me to my most fundamental work principle:
