Principles – Ray Dalio

-

ISBN:978-1-5011-2402-0
Verdict: 👍👍 👍 👍 

Seldom a business book comes along that one both enjoys and learns from, here we have one of those books. 

 Don’t be mislead by the title, it is more than just a cluster of great principles, it’s the foundations for an approach Ray adopted to build his amazing multi billion-dollar business with great insights into how he grew it.


The principles are summariesed in the middle of the book (p272) for the both Life and Work principles discussed in the book – my favorite two principles are ;
Life: Principle 5.1– Learn How to Make Decisions Effectively – Recognize that 1) The biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions, and 2) decision making is a two-step process (first learning then deciding).   p276   
Work: Principle 4.4– Get and Stay in Sync – If its your meeting to run, manage the conversation.   p282 

With so many nuggets of wisdom in this book I can only recommend that one reads the book cover to cover. However heres a few;

·      Discovering Risk Parity.. cash, which is the worst investment  p69
·      Try, fail, diagnose, redesign and try again  p118
·      Nothing more important than understanding how reality works and how to deal with it. The state of mind you bring to this process makes all the difference.   p134

At the end of the book Ray puts it all together in a few pages with the notion that  for an organisation to adopt a idea meritocracy its people to do three things - p540;
  1. Put their honest thoughts on the table for everyone to see 
  2. Have thoughtful disagreements where there are quality back-and-forth in which people evolve their thinking to come uop with the best collective answers possible and
  3. Abide by idea-meritocratic ways of getting past the remaining disagreements (such as believability-weighted decision making)

For me p537 presents a great summary of life choices i,e why we work with others - heres a picture ; 
When my highlighter 📝is used excessively, it's a good indicator of the value I got from a book, and this book was spoilt by many a bright yellow highlight on near every other page.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Surrounded by Idiots – The Four Types of Human Behaviour (or, How to Understand those Who Cannot Be Understood) – Thomas Erikson

-
Image
ISBN:  978-1-78504-218-8 Verdict :👍👍 I enjoyed reading this book with its elaboration of the concepts that centre around the D ominance, I nducement, S ubmission and A nalytics ability (DISA) system for  human  communication which the Author breaks into 4 Color Types ( Red , Yellow , Blue & Green ) and says that " behaviour.Its like a  recipe  - we need to understand all the ingredients before we bake the cake " p13 The book discusses the various  behavioural  traits of individuals which the author centers around a 4 square color model, with each color representing a specific trait and some behavioral patterns associated with the colors - here are some snippets; The Quote "Only Dead Fish Go with the Flow" to describe Reds is classical where Reds are quick thinkers and one on long before everyone else. Yellows can be amusing, creative and elevate the mood regardless of who they are with         p64 " ...
Read more

WHAT IT TAKES - Stephen A. Schwarzman

-
Image
ISBN:  978-1-4711-8955-5 Verdict :   👍👍 You have to respect Scharwazman for what he has achieved in his long life, reinforcing to some extent the old saying that ‘ money makes money ’.This book is worth reading if you are working in finance and is quite a nice read. The book takes you down Stephen's memory lane and his life time of investing. It’s a short book and does lack clarity on the analysis, rules and logic applied on the business decisions. The book is about Stephen and the people he knows and boy does he ‘name drop’, throughout the book, to the extent it was getting boring reading another name popping up towards the end.  There are snippets on Blackstone’s Business Drivers/Methodology e.g.  Blackstone’s three tests  “It must have potential to be hugely rewarding for investors . It must add to Blackstone intellectual capital. And it must have a 10 in charge of it.”          p281  Be...
Read more

The Technology Trap - Carl Benedikt Frey

-
Image
I SBN :  978-0691172798 Verdict :  👍👍   👍 This is one of those books that you have to read in full to fully appreciate, with its well-researched examples to support the concept behind the book.  The book highlights how current automation and Artificial intelligent(AI) systems trends can be used with an historical economic lens to project and address the economic, political and social affects that will arise and by using examples from the industrial revolution when technology displaced workers we can predict the effects of technologies like driverless cars. I like the structured approach to present the argument and learnt along the way with references to various paradox ( Moravec, Polanyi etc. .) which I had not come across before and had to look up  Here are some bits I highlighted in the book. however, there were quite a few so I couldn't  list them all ; The pre-industrial era did not suffer a shortage of imagination, it suffered from a shortage o...
Read more