I’ve worked at an early-stage startup inspired by Bridgewater culture. It was aspiring to be “radical honesty + compassion.”
There were a number of issues with the company (some of them my fault). But in general, the company didn’t succeed at making radical honesty feel safe (meanwhile, I’ve heard that Bridgewater is an incredibly stressful place to work at, although some stories made it seem more like “the first year feels sort of like hazing, after that it feels reasonable.”)
In Ray Dalio’s Principles book, he says that there were severe growing pains as Bridgewater transitioned from small-to-big. In the earlier years, they were small enough and everyone knew each other well enough for the radical honesty thing to work. As they grew, many new employees constantly felt like they were getting yelled at, and eventually Dalio’s colleagues told him he was stressing everyone out and needed to change. What they ended up doing was developing principles that made the radical honesty stuff more systematized, with clearer expectations.
My overall take is that this sort of direction is probably good, but requires either a lot of internal alignment and existing trust (i.e. small teams), or requires a lot of skill on the part of managers to make it actually feel (and be) safe.
Main point being, if you’re an aspiring company founder, don’t assume going this route will be easy.
This makes reasonable sense, with a caveat:
I’ve worked at an early-stage startup inspired by Bridgewater culture. It was aspiring to be “radical honesty + compassion.”
There were a number of issues with the company (some of them my fault). But in general, the company didn’t succeed at making radical honesty feel safe (meanwhile, I’ve heard that Bridgewater is an incredibly stressful place to work at, although some stories made it seem more like “the first year feels sort of like hazing, after that it feels reasonable.”)
In Ray Dalio’s Principles book, he says that there were severe growing pains as Bridgewater transitioned from small-to-big. In the earlier years, they were small enough and everyone knew each other well enough for the radical honesty thing to work. As they grew, many new employees constantly felt like they were getting yelled at, and eventually Dalio’s colleagues told him he was stressing everyone out and needed to change. What they ended up doing was developing principles that made the radical honesty stuff more systematized, with clearer expectations.
My overall take is that this sort of direction is probably good, but requires either a lot of internal alignment and existing trust (i.e. small teams), or requires a lot of skill on the part of managers to make it actually feel (and be) safe.
Main point being, if you’re an aspiring company founder, don’t assume going this route will be easy.