It was towards the end of 2017 that I got my hands on Principles a book written by Ray Dalio, CEO of the biggest Hedge Fund firm in the World — Bridgewater Associates. I had already read the summary version of Principles by then and was a big admirer of his efforts to build a team based on meritocracy. But one of the best parts of the book that I could relate with was the section under “Work Principles” where he explains how he tried to build a culture in which it is okay to make mistakes and unacceptable not to learn from them.

He goes onto elaborate how his company ended up losing to the tune of hundreds of thousand of dollars because of a careless mistake by one of his employees. He understood that letting the person go would build a culture that’s averse to failures and came up with a public log where everyone should list down the mistakes they commit, explain how it impacted the customers / company in detail and with reflection on how it could be avoided in the future. Everyone is expected to read the error logs and this has helped them avoid recurring mistakes or failures while also building a culture that encourages the team to move fast and break things. More about our adaptation of error logs in the blog post.