- Bridgewater employees have famously rated one another’s performance in real-time.
- High-earning managers and lower-paid custodial staff were all subject to the public ratings, a new book says.
- Ray Dalio even fired an employee based on his peers’ answers to a poll about him, “The Fund” says.
It didn’t matter if you were one of the top bosses, or one of the lowest-paid people on the ladder: If you were an employee at Ray Dalio’s hedge fund, you were going to get publicly rated — and a new book sheds new light on the process.
At Bridgewater Associates, hundreds of employees had their own personal so-called baseball cards, which featured dots, or numbers, rating them on a 1-to-10 scale, the book said.
Rob Copeland’s “The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend” was released on Tuesday, and it details some of what Copeland found out about the rating system for all Bridgewater employees.
Information was compiled into individual employee profiles, which were known as baseball cards around the office, the book said. Workers were each judged in the same categories — and the baseball cards were public for all to view.
But as colleagues rated one another in real time, a tendency emerged to pile onto those with lower scores and do everything possible to align with those ranked highly, according to the book.
Forgetting to stock up the office sodas would bring a storm of negative ratings for the employee responsible — and assistants would receive low scores if their bosses were late to a meeting, the book said.
Bus drivers would be investigated if they kept the bus too cool or too warm, even though different employees might submit different complaints based on personal preferences, according to “The Fund.” And employees were recorded during meetings to later be assessed — a practice that was common under Dalio’s principles for running a successful company.
Dalio would pause meetings to conduct polls on whether or not a particular employee was doing their job well, the book said.
Michael Partington, a recruiting manager earning more than $2 million a year when he started at the company, was subjected to such public assessments, according to the book. Partington was tasked with bringing Bridgewater “to the promised land,” the book said.
After one year in his position, Dalio sent out a poll to the entire company: “Does Michael Partington add value?” according to the book.
After his question was met with negative responses, Dalio cut Partington’s salary in half, the book said.
“You haven’t taken us to the promised land,” Dalio told him, according to the book. Partington was later fired by the Bridgewater founder after less than five years, the book said. Partington didn’t comment in the book. He didn’t respond to a request for comment from Insider made by email.
In a footnote in the book on a section on employee reviews, Bridgewater lawyers said: “Through the onboarding process and using the results from personality assessments as a starting point, new hires were encouraged to reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses.”
Meanwhile, Dalio has commented more broadly on the book in a recent LinkedIn post. In it, he said the book is “another one of those sensational and inaccurate tabloid books written to sell books to people who like gossip.”
“Bridgewater obviously is not and was not as he describes it,” Dalio wrote of the author, Copeland. “If it were, it wouldn’t have had so many happy employees who have stayed so long (about one-third have been there for over 10 years) and it wouldn’t have such great client loyalty and longevity (the average client has been with Bridgewater for 12 years).”
Dalio said in the post that he would not be giving the book any more attention.
