Reading a book is easy. It’s much harder to take what’s in the book and incorporate it into our lives. I like to tackle this problem by distilling books down to a few tactics that I can implement quickly. 1

In a previous post, I outlined 4 ways that you can make better decisions using Ray Dalio’s life principles. In this post, I’ll outline what I think are the most impactful and actionable tactics from Dalio’s work principles.

Here they are:

1) How To Run A Meeting

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.” ― Dave Barry 

Dalio often describes his organization as an intellectual version of the Navy Seals, and it’s clear from his Principles that like the military, he has an affinity for structure. So it shouldn’t be surprising that he thinks the most important part of running a meeting is to be clear about who is in charge and what the meeting is supposed to achieve:

Make it clear who is directing the meeting and whom it is meant to serve. Every meeting should be aimed at achieving someone’s goals; that person is the one responsible for meeting and deciding what they want to get out of it and how they will do so. Meetings without someone clearly responsible run a high risk of being directionless and unproductive

– Principles, Work Principle 4.4 – A

Dalio’s second Principle for running effective meetings is to assign someone to keep track of both responsibilities and the conversation flow. Said person ensures that any tasks to be done are assigned to specific people and not forgotten. They also ensure that the meeting doesn’t veer too far off topic.

Be careful not to lose personal responsibility via group decision making. Too often groups will make a decision to do something without assigning personal responsibilities, so it is not clear who is supposed to follow up by doing what. Be clear in assigning personal responsibilities.

– Principles, Work Principle 4.4 – H

Watch out for “topic slip.” Topic slip is random drifting from topic to topic without achieving completion on any of them. One way to avoid it is by tracking the conversation on a whiteboard so that everyone can see where you are. (Emphasis mine)

– Principles, Work Principle 4.4 – F

Applying Dalio’s tactics may make people feel uncomfortable at first, but in the long run, it will reduce peoples anxiety about meetings because they’ll know how they’re expected to behave and that their time won’t be wasted.

2) Use Standing Meetings

Our true priorities are defined by where we spend our resources, and that most often means where we spend our precious time. Too often though the distractions of daily business pull us along low-value tangents that take ours and others time away from where it would best spent. Dalio has found that the best way to avoid these distractions is to habituate your time allocations by setting standing meetings. For instance, if your company priority is sales, you should have a weekly sales meeting.

Use standing meetings to help your organization run like a swiss clock. Regularly scheduled meetings add to overall efficiency by enduring that important interactions and to-do’s aren’t overlooked, eliminating the need for efficient coordination, and improving operations (because repetition leads to refinement). It pays to have standardized meeting agendas that ask the same feedback questions in each meeting, (such as how effective the meeting was) and nonstandard meeting agendas that include things done infrequently (such as quarterly budget reviews).

– Principles, Work Principle 13.3 – D

3) Use Daily Updates To Stay In Sync

Use daily updates as a tool for staying on top of what your people are doing and thinking. I ask each person who reports to me to take about ten to fifteen minutes to write a brief description of what they did that day, the issues pertaining to them, and their reflections. By reading these updates and triangulating them, (i.e., seeing other people’s takes on what their doing together), I can gauge how they are working together, what their moods are, and which threads I should pull on.

-Principles, Work Principle 10.6 – C

Imagine if you woke up every morning instantly knowing what everyone in your company intended to work on that day and everyone else knew the same thing. Appealing, because of how incredibly efficient that might make everything, right? And, at the same time, kind of terrifying because you don’t want everyone looking over your shoulder judging what you intend to do every day.

The latter concern was why I first resisted using daily updates. I told myself, “I’m competent. I don’t need someone looking over my shoulder to do the right thing.” But now that I’ve been using it for a few months, I’ve come to see the value in it.

For me specifically, it’s as simple as sending my colleague a list of things I intend to work on each day. And in addition to it being a useful communication tool, it helps me organize my day and prioritize what I need to work on first. By contrast, my old habit of jumping into my email first-thing would lead me down a rabbit hole that didn’t necessarily reflect my priorities.

4) Use Process Flow Diagrams

Dalio’s ideal is a company that runs like a machine. At its core, a machine is a set of processes. Using process flow diagrams can help you visualize the different processes that make up your organization. These visuals help managers understand how resources will be allocated and interact with each other. But more importantly, they help ensure that everyone understands how the organization is expected to run and their role within it.

Understand that a great manager is essentially an organizational engineer. Great managers are not philosophers, entertainers, doers or artists. They are engineers. They see their organizations as machines and work assiduously to maintain and improve them. They create process flow diagrams to show how the machine works and to evaluate its design. They build metrics to light up how well each of the individual parts of the machine (most importantly, the people) and the machine as a whole are working. And they tinker constantly with its designs and its people to make both better.

– Principles, Work Principles, 10.1 – B

Process Flow Diagrams. Just as an engineer uses flowcharts to understand the workflow of what they’re designing, a manager needs a Process Flow Diagram to help visualize the organization as a machine. It might have references to an organizational chart that shows who reports to whom, or the org chart might supplement the Process Flow Diagram (PFD). Ideally the PFD is made in a way that allows you to both see things simply at a high level and drop down to low level. 

– Principles, Appendix

Since reading Principles, I’ve used process flow diagrams to visualize a number of personal and professional activities. I find that creating visual representations allows people to communicate more effectively about complex processes then they could otherwise.

 

 

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If you enjoyed this post, check out these other posts on Ray Dalio’s Principles:

Ray Dalio’s Principles – 4 Steps To Better Decisions

Ray Dalio’s Secret Sauce – The Truth Machine & The Good Life 

 

1. The difference between tactics and strategy is strategy tells you what you should do, tactics tells you what to do. In other words, a strategy is the more general goal and tactics are the things you do to make that goal happen. ↩