Review: Principles: Life and Work

Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author is a fellow who really likes process, rules, and, yes, principles. I had never heard of the author, but found the first part of the book, the autobiographical part, to be very interesting. This is what I would consider a business biography, but from an entrepreneur’s perspective. You get the birth and growth of the business, yes, but you also get the family background and upbringing that led him to his business style, which is what the second half of the book is about. The author describes in some detail the principals with which he built his business and how he hopes it runs as he reduces his time there. This had the feeling of a story about mean Steve Jobs. When you read about the things that Jobs did to his employees, you thought Apple/Next was quite a unique environment, and were glad you weren’t there. Dalio leaves the same impression with his rulebook on running a company, rules that seem quite extreme compared to the average business, rules that make me think he’s talking about a commercial version of a utopian community. He denies multiple times that his company is a cult – doesn’t that always make you wonder? As I am not planning on building a company with a strong social governance component, I found the second half of the book dry. I did enjoy the first half, though. While I’m sure he’s hiding some of the warts in his story, he does expose a surprising number. I found the story of Dalio’s rise to great wealth and the openness with which he describes many missteps he freely documents to be quite interesting.

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