If you had asked me what my objective was when I started out, I would’ve said it was to have fun working with people I like. Work was a game I played with passion and I wanted to have a blast playing it with people I enjoyed and respected. I started Bridgewater out of my apartment with a pal I played rugby with who had no experience in the markets and a friend we hired as our assistant. I certainly wasn’t thinking about management at the time. Management seemed to me like something people in gray suits with slide presentations did. I never set out to manage, let alone to have principles about work and management.
From reading Life Principles, you know that I liked to imagine and build out new, practical concepts that never existed before. I especially loved doing these things with people who were on the same mission with me. I treasured thoughtful disagreement with them as a way of learning and raising our odds of making good decisions, and I wanted all the people I worked with to be my “partners” rather than my “employees.” In a nutshell, I was looking for meaningful work and meaningful relationships. I quickly learned that the best way to do that was to have great partnerships with great people.
To me, great partnerships come from sharing common values and interests, having similar approaches to pursuing them, and being reasonable with, and having consideration for, each other. At the same time, partners must be willing to hold each other to high standards and work through their disagreements. The main test of a great partnership is not whether the partners ever disagree, people in all healthy relationships disagree, but whether they can bring their disagreements to the surface and get through them well. Having clear processes for resolving disagreements efficiently and clearly is essential for business partnerships, marriages, and all other forms of partnership.
My wanting these things attracted others who wanted the same things, which drove how we shaped Bridgewater together. When there were five of us it was totally different than when there were fifty of us, which was totally different than it was when we were five hundred, a thousand, and so on. As we grew, most everything changed beyond recognition, except for our core values and principles.
When Bridgewater was still a small company, the principles by which we operated were more implicit than explicit. But as more and more new people came in, I couldn’t take for granted that they would understand and preserve them. I realized that I needed to write our principles out explicitly and explain the logic behind them. I remember the precise moment when this shift occurred, it was when the number of people at Bridgewater passed sixty-seven. Up until then, I had personally chosen each employee’s holiday gift and written them a lengthy personalized card, but trying to do it that year broke my back. From that point on, an increasing number of people came in who didn’t work closely with me, so I couldn’t assume they would understand where I was coming from or what I was striving to create, which was an idea-meritocracy built on tough love.
Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships.
To give you an idea of what I mean by tough love, think of Vince Lombardi, who for me personified it. From when I was ten years old until I was eighteen, Lombardi was head coach of the Green Bay Packers. With limited resources, he led his team to five NFL championships. He won two NFL Coach of the Year awards and many still call him the best coach of all time. Lombardi loved his players and he pushed them to be great. I admired, and still admire, how uncompromising his standards were. His players, their fans, and he himself all benefited from his approach. I wish Lombardi had written out his principles for me to read.
In order to be great, one can’t compromise the uncompromisable. Yet I see people doing it all the time, usually to avoid making others or themselves feel uncomfortable, which is not just backward but counterproductive. Putting comfort ahead of success produces worse results for everyone. I both loved the people I worked with and pushed them to be great, and I expected them to do the same with me.