The reason "fire quickly" may be appealing advice to some is that solving problems takes effort without a clear guarantee of return, and leaders usually end up trying easy solutions that diffuse blame or create the illusion that something has changed. Then they wonder why productivity is not up or why employee sentiment is middleing.
I also wonder what their actual competitive advantage was. My guess is Dalio himself had a good way to think about economic questions, and that they used not-too-simplified computer modeling before most others.
1. Dalio doesn't understand what a "principle" is -- but I can understand that "Aphorisms, Cliches and Hunches" is a less arresting title, if much more accurate. (See [0] for a fuller review on this.)
2. Dalio's version of Bridgewater doesn't line up with the experience of others -- which I have heard from so many people as to completely undermine whatever he might say.
Now, in the book's defense: I didn't get through it and perhaps it got suddenly palatable or interesting. However: I also couldn't get through it -- it was just that bad.
What, in your opinion, defines what is sensible in business and leads to your frustration with Dalio's message? Can you give personal anecdotes?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc
We just hired for a management position a couple of month ago and I could tell from the very first meeting that it was a bad hire. I made sure with my team that I’m not totally wrong and then communicated my doubts to the C-Level. It took some time because they wanted to give them a real chance but just before the probation ended there was an evaluation meeting and the feedback was, without exception, negative. Took two days and they were gone.
Of course there will be hires that can uphold their charade for six month but I would say that’s an exception.
Back in university, most of the students in my Chemistry course had A-Bs (grades were published publicly). The final for the course though was set up by some national body (in the US), and all but a few in the class got no higher than a D. Why? Because the national test was reflective of what students actually learned. The typical university multiple-choice test just self-selected good test takers. I myself got in the habit of only attending certain classes once a month because I knew how to game the tests and still walk away with an A-B average (e.g. have a good idea of what will be tested, know the material well enough that you can eliminate 50% of the false answers, and then make an educated guess on the rest.)
The same is true in hiring. It can be easily gamed if you don't have a great interview process (most companies don't). Even worse, part of that is by necessity. Each candidate has a different set of experiences, but the interview is made to be as routine and consistent as possible to weed out any potential biases (e.g. candidate given purposefully hard question or colored feedback because interviewer didn't like them). To truly vet a candidate, you would need situational questions and feedback, like they quickly glossed over some part of the question, so I'm going to go off-script and drill down into this area. Big companies especially run far away from that due to risk of discrimination lawsuits.
Lawsuits
Details vary, but for example in Poland you can (simplified case):
1. Hire for fixed-length term of a year 2. First 3 months of that are "trial period" - you have minimal paperwork for firing during that time, effectively no chance of lawsuit (if someone brings a lawsuit that gets far enough for any paperwork to reach you, you have much worse things to take care of internally) 3. After the fixed-length period, if you're happy with the employee and want him to continue you switch to "permanent" contract. If not, the term lapses and that's it.