Since the relative importance of these three things varies by person, it is up to you to determine the quantities and mix you want. The important thing to realize is that they are mutually supportive. If you want to accomplish your mission, you will be better off having quality relationships with people committed to that mission and financial resources to put behind it. Similarly, if you want to have a great work community, you will need a shared mission and financial resources to support you, and if you want to make the most money possible, you will need clear goals and tight relationships to achieve them. In my life, I have been lucky to have much more of all three of these than I could have ever imagined. I have tried to convey the approach that worked for me, an idea-meritocracy in which meaningful work and meaningful relationships are the goals and radical truth and radical transparency are the ways of achieving them, so that you can decide what, if any of it, is of use to you. Recognizing that I gave you a pile of principles that could be confusing, I want to make sure that the headline I’m trying to get across comes through. It is that of all approaches to decision-making, an idea-meritocracy is the best. It’s almost too obvious to warrant saying, but I will anyway: Knowing what you can and cannot expect from each person and knowing what to do to make sure the best ideas win out are the best way to make decisions. Idea-meritocratic decision-making is better than traditional autocratic or democratic decision-making in almost all cases. That’s not just theory. While there is no such thing as utopia just like there is no such thing as perfect, there is great, and there isn’t much doubt that the results of this idea-meritocratic approach have been pretty great for Bridgewater for more than forty years. Because this approach can work equally well in most organizations, I wanted to lay it out clearly and in detail. While you needn’t follow this idea-meritocratic approach exactly as I’ve done it, the big question is: Do you want to work in an idea-meritocracy? If so, what is the best way for you to do that? An idea-meritocracy requires people to do the following: Put their honest thoughts on the table for everyone to see, Have thoughtful disagreements where there are quality back-and-forths in which people evolve their thinking to come up with the best collective answers possible, and Abide by idea-meritocratic ways of getting past the remaining disagreements (such as believability-weighted decision-making). While an idea-meritocracy doesn’t have to operate exactly in any particular way, it does have to by and large follow those three steps.
Don’t worry about remembering all the particular principles that I gave you in this book. Just go after having an idea-meritocracy and figure out what works for you by encountering your trade-offs and coming up with your principles for handling them. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships, and I believed that being radically truthful and radically transparent were required to get those. Then I went after them and encountered problems that forced me to make choices. By writing down how I made these choices, I was able to flesh out my principles, which led me to shape Bridgewater’s idea-meritocracy with the people I worked with so that it would work well for us. As you set out on your own and encounter your own impediments, you might want to refer back to these principles because chances are that I’ve encountered many of the same impediments, did my wrestling with how to handle them, and laid out my thinking in principles. And then write down your own. Of course, people’s abilities to influence how their group works vary, and I don’t know your circumstances. But I do know that if you want to work in an idea-meritocratic way, you can find your own way of doing that. Maybe it will be by helping shape your organization from the top, maybe it will be by choosing the right organization for you, and maybe it will be by simply dealing with the people you work with in an idea-meritocratic way. No matter your position, you can always practice being open-minded and assertive at the same time, and thinking about your and others’ believabilities when deciding what to do. Above all else, my wishes for you are that: You can make your work and your passion one and the same; You can struggle well with others on your common mission to produce the previously mentioned rewards; You can savor both your struggles and your rewards, lastly you will evolve quickly and contribute to evolution in significant ways.