A billionaire, whose approach to announcing layoffs was likened to the Hunger Games, adopted an unconventional management style by recording every employee meeting.
Ray Dalio, a New York native now aged 75, has accumulated a $14 billion fortune as the founder of Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund based in Connecticut.
He is well known in the corporate sphere for his management tactics at the firm, which relied on what he called ‘The Principles’—a series of guidelines designed to solve problems and suggest pathways to success.
By 2016, forty years after Dalio launched the business in 1975, Bridgewater had grown to 1,700 full-time employees, in addition to a number of temporary contractors.
While growth is generally positive for a company, a book about Dalio, called The Fund, suggests the firm had become ‘unwieldy and hard to manage’.
Author Rob Copeland asserts that Dalio was aware of this, prompting him to announce that significant layoffs were necessary to safeguard the business.
According to Copeland, employees were put in a position where they had to ‘outlast’ each other during the layoffs, with some comparing the experience to the ‘Hunger Games’.
Competing for job security is undesirable for employees, yet Dalio emphasized transparency, aligning with his Principle of honesty during the layoffs. However, Copeland suggests that Dalio adhered to this transparency on his own terms.
The ‘Transparency Library’, as described in the book, was one of Dalio’s ‘most prized creations’. It contained tens of thousands of hours of recorded meetings, capturing everything from intense debates to mundane economic discussions. There were so many recordings that some were never revisited.
Nonetheless, if Dalio needed to review a meeting, the recording was available for him.
This was exemplified in a meeting with employee Katina Stefanova, where Dalio allegedly criticized her for not meeting hiring expectations.
Copeland’s book recounts that Dalio made Stefanova cry during the meeting but later edited the recording to portray himself as a ‘kind but firm questioner’.
The purpose of recording meetings was ostensibly to facilitate staff development, but in Stefanova’s case, Dalio reportedly distributed the recording to the firm’s thousand employees, titled ‘Pain + Reflection = Progress’.
According to Copeland, the recording of meetings was merely the ‘tip’ of Bridgewater’s surveillance. The organization was committed to monitoring behavior to ensure employees adhered to expectations.
In support of this, they enlisted a former FBI official as head of security. Copeland details how employees were seemingly under constant watch.
Surveillance covered aspects such as whether computers were locked when left unattended, documents being printed or photocopied, and email attachments being sent.
In reaction to Copeland’s book, a representative for Dalio told Business Insider it was ‘another one of those classic tabloid books’.
The spokesperson pointed out that Copeland had previously been turned down for a position at Bridgewater—a fact the author acknowledged in his book—and alleged he wrote ‘distorted stories about Bridgewater and Ray Dalio’.
“He did this by speaking with former employees who had been dismissed, seeking out negative rumors, and making up the stories he wanted to fit his narrative because he wasn’t there for the events he describes,” the spokesperson stated.
“In fact, the author states in the preface that the book is filled with made-up dialogue and the book’s footnotes are full of statements from people directly contradicting what is written about them.
“The picture the book paints is obviously implausible given Bridgewater’s long track record of investment performance and its high percentage of long-tenured employees. Mr. Dalio doesn’t want to divert his attention from more important things to discuss this trivial gossipy book.”