One Man Attempt to Fit Every Employee on a Metric
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Long read, but interesting. About a hedge fund billionaire who tried to set up some sort of weird rating system for every employee.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ray-dalio-rob-copeland-the-fund-book-excerpt.html
The piss case, as it was known internally, was merely a small example of the expansive Bridgewater employee-rating system in action. Staffers were given iPads and directed to rank one another on a one-to-ten scale on their performance dozens of times per day in categories derived from Dalio’s Principles, such as “ability to self-assess” and “pushing through to results.” Dalio would often review the results in his office, where the Bridgewater founder would lean back in his chair, chewing on Scotch tape, as was his habit when he was concentrating, and review the ever-changing ratings of those under him.
The goal of all the data, Dalio would say, was to sort everyone at Bridgewater on a single scale. At Bridgewater, the most important assessment was “believability,” a score that was applied to each category. If one was judged highly believable in “pushing through to results,” for instance, then his or her ratings of other people in the same category would be counted more heavily. Dalio called this “believability weighting,” and in virtually all important categories, Dalio expected that his rating would be the highest, or close to it, at the firm. That status essentially gave him the final word, no matter how many others at Bridgewater might have disagreed with him.
For more than a decade, at a cost that would balloon to over $100 million, Bridgewater attempted to develop secret software to expand the Principles into what employees widely described as a computerized version of Dalio himself. One iteration carried the nickname “Prince,” short for Principles. Prince was to be the equivalent of Siri, the voice-activated assistant on Apple products. Just as billions of consumers around the world spoke to Siri to get the answers to their queries, so, too, would Prince be the singular source for answers according to the Principles and highly believable employees. The product was intended for use first inside Bridgewater and then, Dalio hoped, by the world.
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Imagine all the ambitious go-getters who'd lose a limb to work there. People of a certain level of competitiveness will put themselves through absolute dehumanizing hell, in order to climb to a position where they feel they've won. One can feel lucky not to be encumbered by that sort of competitiveness.
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So ... did the employees get to rate the boss?
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@Axtremus said in One Man Attempt to Fit Every Employee on a Metric:
So ... did the employees get to rate the boss?
They did, but since Mr. Dalio controlled the whole process, the ratings were "fixed" such that his personality traits were what everyone should strive to.
