Ray Dalio: Company Culture and the Power of Thoughtful Disagreement

This video probably summarizes what I have learned this year not only as an investor, but also as a human being. Do you want your company to make a difference? Create and nurture an outstanding culture. It might sound odd to most people, even from people within, but you have to put your beliefs in practice. That's how others companies also work. As Dalio puts its, the real difference is either on people or culture.

In his company's case, the ruthlessly transparent internal environment (forcefully) creates a trustful atmosphere, in which thoughtful disagreement foments knowledge creation. The possible issue: as people are smart in so many different ways, they must appreciate each other and make a team of them - the possible solution: the culture itself. It takes a genius to make it simple, and Dalio indeed did it by building an environment built on truth and thus, trust.

Culture is self-reinforcing.

 
"My biggest advantage is that I know what I don't know."

The Culture of Learning as The Ultimate Competitive Advantage

'The end of work' has been quite of a debated theme, including by Brynjolfsson, McAfee, Drucker, Keynes, Andreessen, among others. As Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief has put it,

The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the end of introduction of tractors.

Fast forward, (robotic) engineering and automation in general have played quite a role in the last decade. As Mr. Gave put it in his book titled "Too Different for Comfort",

Thanks to functionality, and lower prices, the global 'labor-cost arbitrage' trend, which was the predominant macroeconomic feature of the past decade, may now be coming to an end.

Automobile manufacturers were the main beneficiaries of robotization wave #1, followed by electronic devices industry. More recently, we have seen other industries also benefit from the same trend.

The most staggering fact though is that we may be entering into a new revolution within this decade - a Robolution - as lower robots costs and inflationary labor costs converge, favoring robots adoption by industry participants.

But what types of jobs are at risk? Again recurring to Gave's book "Too different for comfort", he categorizes 4 kinds of jobs, being:

That said, categories 3 and 4 certainly fall at risk, while we (equity investors & research analysts) certainly follow under category 2 - non repetitive and complex tasks - and are likely shielded from robots. Thus, if we are indeed safe from robots, how could we lever our skills to better perform our jobs at the individual level, but more importantly, at the company level? Here kicks in Edward Hess and his recently published book "Learn or die: Using science to build a leading-edge learning organization".

Hess' motivation to write the book likely emanated from the conclusion that continually learning better and faster than the competition may be the only sustainable competitive advantage individually and organizationally. Take McGrath's thought-provoking book "The end of competitive advantage: how to keep your strategy moving as fast as your business" as the basis of this. If this assertion is correct, then to perform at a high level on job category 2 we must lever critical thinking, innovative thinking, emotional and social high engagement and other humans. As Hess put it,

the way to unify operational excellence and innovation in an organization is to have a learning culture, because learning underlies operational excellence and it underlies innovation.

In a recent interview with Hess conducted by Shane Parrish from Farnam Street blog, Hess lied a couple tenets of a learning culture, such as de-emphasized hierarchy, intellectual and leadership humility, curiosity, questioning, the right to debate freely, clarity, preparation, a praise for vulnerability, strong processes, accountability, empathy, compassion, humane relationships, no complacency, and so on.

At the end of the day, what we are talking about here is a CULTURE OF LEARNING. At Bridgewater, for instance, the culture is so strong we might call it a doctrine or a religion - if haven't read Ray Dalio's principles yet, please do! As companies with such a peculiar culture say it, "we are not for everyone!"

As I don't to spoil Hess' amazing book, I will finish this post with a couple quotes I got from his previous mentioned interview.

Number one, underlying innovation and operational excellence, go back to root cause analysis, or the five why's. Unpacking assumptions, good digging, the why, why, why, is underlying both processes.

Hierarchy as an elitism is de-emphasized, and there is a real push for highly engaging employees and leadership humility, and intellectual humility. (...) Does the CEO own the learning culture and walk the talk? (...) Has the organization put in place culture, structured leadership behaviors, HR policies, measurement and rewards to enable and promote learning behaviors? (...) You've got to start small and figure out and prioritize what you are really going to start working on.

Arrogance is a huge inhibitor to learning. Arrogance comes also from success in positional authority.

Where can I improve? What happened today? What would I do differently in how I think? What would I do differently in that conversation as to how I relate?

A leadership model that is very, very humanistic and people-oriented.

 The purpose of the whole system at Bridgewater is to overcome our humanness in a humane way. (...) The first thing they want to talk about is their vulnerability.

You don't put things off. You deal with them directly, honestly, openly. (...) everything about everybody is public record. 

Indeed, we are all work-in-progress until the last day of our lives. Thinking about how we are thinking is a never ending loop. We can't ever truly get comfortable. As this topic may look too 'soft' for for-profit companies, actually, it's not according to Hess:

There's this whole concept in the business world that if you're humanistic and engaging with people, you'll come across as soft. People will take advantage of you. (...) It's not the case. You can be humanistic and have high standards and high accountability. The companies I write about, every one of them are outstanding performers because they have the highest of standards that they hold themselves to. There is no softness in standards. There's a human element.

Berkshire Beyond Buffet: Excerpt from Chapter 8

Lawrence Cunningham's new book Berkshire Beyond Buffet is scheduled to be released on Oct 21st, though you can find here the chapter 8 from the book. Below, notice Berkshire's tenets for its subsidiaries' CEOs praising independence, trust and an owner's mindset:

"Berkshire corporate policy strikes a balance between autonomy and authority. Buffett issues written instructions every two years that reflect this balance. The missive states the mandates Berkshire places on subsidiary CEOs: (1) guard Berkshire’s reputation; (2) report bad news early; (3) confer about post-retirement benefit changes and large capital expenditures (including acquisitions, which are encouraged); (4) adopt a fifty-year time horizon; (5) refer any opportunities for a Berkshire acquisition to Omaha; and (6) submit written successor recommendations. Otherwise, Berkshire stresses that managers are chosen because of their excellence and are urged to act on that excellence."

It's All About the Top-line

The panel below depicts crystal clear how activists' investing philosophies may widely differ. ValueAct demonstrates how it works collaboratively with executives and board members focusing on top-line initiatives, while others would rather use financial engineering techniques such as spin-offs, reverse merges and fiscal maneuvers and interact more aggressively with management.

At the end of the day, I feel myself prone to the former approach: driving sustainable top-line growth.

Mafia Insights Into Quality Investing: No Kidding!

In one of Gladwell's latest articles entitled "The Crooked Ladder" he puts that old mafias were simply an attempt to be accepted by the society. Moreover, one of the biggest misconceptions in movies and also by us is that the really dangerous guys are those street drug dealers. Actually, those are not. As Gladwell puts it,

That’s why the crooked ladder worked as well as it did. The granddaughter could end up riding horses because the law—whether from indifference, incompetence, or corruption—left her gangster grandfather alone. The idea that, in the course of a few generations, the gangster can give way to an equestrian is perhaps the hardest part of the innovation argument to accept. We have become convinced of the opposite trajectory: the benign low-level drug dealer becomes the malignant distributor and then the brutal drug lord. The blanket policing imposed on 6th Street is justified by the idea that, left unchecked, Mike and Chuck will get worse. Their delinquency will metastasize. The crooked-ladder theorists looked at the Mafia’s evolution during the course of the twentieth century, however, and reached the opposite conclusion: that, over time, the criminal vocation was inevitably domesticated.

At the same time, one of the most insightful takeaways for me is that the real 'bad guys' were the ones who made illicit things at the society's face. On top of that, they focused on niches and represented a really tiny slice of the cost structure of the entire value chain. With that, they had pricing power, outstanding returns on capital and no one bothered about them.

"James Jacobs, a New York University law professor who was involved in anti-Mafia efforts in New York during the nineteen-eighties, points out that the Mafia had every opportunity to take over the entire carting industry in the New York region—just as they could easily have monopolized any of the other industries in which they played a role. Instead, they stayed in the background, content to be the middlemen. At New York’s Fulton Fish Market, one of the largest such markets in the country, the Mob policed the cartel and controlled parking—a crucial amenity in a business where time is of the essence and prompt delivery of fresh fish translates to higher profits. What did they charge for a full day’s parking? Twelve dollars. And when the Mob-controlled cartel was finally rooted out, how much did fish prices decline at the Fulton Fish Market? Two per cent."

“This is one of the most interesting things about the Mafia,” Jacobs went on. “They did business and cooperated. They weren’t trying to smash everybody. They created these alliances and maintained these equilibriums. . . . You’d think that they would keep expanding their reach.”

At the end of the day, isn't that kind of business we are looking for? Companies that aren't bothered by either suppliers or clients, that are really focused on a niche and don't need to put a lot of capital to work while reap a disproportionate part of the profit pool?