Bridgewater Quotes

But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this— we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."—Whewell: "Bridgewater Treatise".

Suki Bridgewater: I shivered, despite the heat from the sun. “I’m married,” I whispered. “I love my husband.

I feel something familiar about this place. This house…” I dragged out a hand and gestured towards it with my thumb. “I dream about it. I’ve been dreaming about it for years. Being in it.” I had her attention. “With you.

Again, the endless northern rain between us like a veil. Tonight, I know exactly where you are, which row, which seat. I stand at my back door. The light pollution blindfolds every star. I hold my hand out to the rain, simply to feel it, wet and literal. It spills and tumbles in my palm, a broken rosary. Devotion to you lets me see the concert hall, lit up, the other side of town, then see you leave there, one of hundreds in the dark, your black umbrella raised. If rain were words, could talk, somehow, against your skin, I’d say look up, let it utter on your face. Now hear my love for you. Now walk. - Bridgewater Hall

Bob Kegan called Bridgewater “a form of proof that the quest for business excellence and the search for personal realization need not be mutually exclusive—and can, in fact, be essential to each other.

You’re my wife, Suki. That gives me every right.

One cowboy is never enough.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency. Later, I’m going to challenge some of Dalio’s principles, but first I want to explain the weapons he has used to wage a war on groupthink.

I didn’t value experience as much as character, creativity, and common sense, which I suppose was related to my having started Bridgewater two years out of school myself, and my belief that having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something.

Assess believability by systematically capturing people’s track records over time. Every day is not a new day. Over time, a body of evidence builds up, showing which people can be relied on and which cannot. Track records matter, and at Bridgewater tools such as Baseball Cards and the Dot Collector make everyone’s track records available for scrutiny.

There was Ruth, lying on her side across my rug, peering at the spines of the cassettes in the low light, and then the Judy Bridgewater tape was in her hands.

Each person at Bridgewater should act like an owner, responsible for operating in this way and for holding others accountable to operate in this way.

MAKING BRIDGEWATER ROCK-SOLID AND CUTTING-EDGE

Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal. Our overriding objective is excellence and constant improvement at Bridgewater. To be clear, it is not to make lots of money. The natural extension of this is not that you should be happy with little money. On the contrary—you should expect to make a lot. If we operate consistently with this philosophy we should be productive and the company should do well financially.

Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal. Our overriding objective is excellence and constant improvement at Bridgewater. To be clear, it is not to make lots of money. The natural extension of this is not that you should be happy with little money. On the contrary—you should expect to make a lot. If we operate consistently with this philosophy we should be productive and the company should do well financially. There is comparatively little age- and seniority-based hierarchy.

Once wealthy, however, people were less consumed by the hunt for the next score. They were more focused on staying rich than getting richer, and their strategy focused on steady, long-term growth and the minimization of the risk of big losses.

In order to match a person to the design, start by creating a spec sheet so that there will be a consistent set of criteria that can be applied from recruiting through performance reviews. Bridgewater’s spec sheets use the same bank of qualities as our Baseball Cards.

Clearly, we needed to build a new governance system that would allow Bridgewater to retain its unique way of being and its uncompromising standards no matter who was in charge—and build it to be resilient enough to change the company’s management if that was required.

Much as I loved the job and the people I worked with, I didn’t fit into the Shearson organization. I was too wild. For example, as a joke that now seems pretty stupid, I hired a stripper to drop her cloak while I was lecturing at a whiteboard at the California Grain & Feed Association’s annual convention. I also punched my boss in the face. Not surprisingly, I was fired. But the brokers, their clients, and even the ones who fired me liked me and wanted to keep getting my advice. Even better, they were willing to pay me for it, so in 1975 I started Bridgewater Associates.

No matter what work you do, at a high level you are simply setting goals and building machines to help you achieve them. I built the machine that is Bridgewater by constantly comparing its actual outcomes to my mental map of the outcomes that it should be producing, and finding ways to improve it.

While making money was good, having meaningful work and meaningful relationships was far better. To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have with people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me. Think about it: It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value—its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want. When thinking about the things you really want, it pays to think of their relative values so you weigh them properly. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money less—as long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs. In thinking about the relative importance of great relationships and money, it was clear that relationships were more important because there is no amount of money I would take in exchange for a meaningful relationship, because there is nothing I could buy with that money that would be more valuable. So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making money was an incidental consequence of that. In the late 1970s, I began sending my observations about the markets to clients via telex. The genesis of these Daily Observations (“ Grains and Oilseeds,” “Livestock and Meats,” “Economy and Financial Markets”) was pretty simple: While our primary business was in managing risk exposures, our clients also called to pick my brain about the markets. Taking those calls became time-consuming, so I decided it would be more efficient to write down my thoughts every day so others could understand my logic and help improve it. It was a good discipline since it forced me to research and reflect every day. It also became a key channel of communication for our business. Today, almost forty years and ten thousand publications later, our Daily Observations are read, reflected on, and argued about by clients and policymakers around the world. I’m still writing them, along with others at Bridgewater, and expect to continue to write them until people don’t care to read them or I die.

My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view.

I was stuck and there was nothing i could do about it. Shit. I hated things that were beyond my control. I wasn't claustrophobic, but i felt trapped just the same.

I didn’t value experience as much as character, creativity, and common sense, which I suppose was related to my having started Bridgewater two years out of school myself, and my belief that having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something. It seemed to me, young people were creating sensible innovation that was exciting.

Their biggest investment priority was to avoid the possibility of ruin. A person who could project understanding of that priority and the knowledge of how to achieve it could make a lot of money.

His advice has helped me in my planning for Bridgewater’s future. For example, when I asked him about checks and balances of power, he pointed to Julius Caesar’s overthrow of the Roman Senate and Republic as an illustration of how important it is to make sure no one person is more powerful than the system. I took his advice to heart as I set out to improve Bridgewater’s governance model.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency.

I never imagined that I was having that sort of effect. These people were my extended family. I didn’t want them to feel “incompetent, unnecessary, humiliated, overwhelmed, belittled, oppressed, or otherwise bad.” Why didn’t they tell me directly? What was I doing wrong? Were my standards too high? For Bridgewater to continue to be a one-in-ten-thousand–type company we had to have exceptional people and hold them to extremely high standards. Was I demanding too much?

To me, the greatest success you can have as the person in charge is to orchestrate others to do things well without you. A step below that is doing things well yourself, and worst of all is doing things poorly yourself. As I reflected on my position, I could see that despite all of my and Bridgewater’s amazing achievements, I had not achieved this highest level of success. In fact, I was still struggling to achieve the second-highest level (doing things well myself), even though Bridgewater was extremely successful.

To quote Adam Grant in Think Again: To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to detach. I’ve learned that two kinds of detachment are especially useful: detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity . . . My past self was Mr. Facts—I was too fixated on knowing. Now I’m more interested in finding out what I don’t know. As Bridgewater founder, Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the past year.”36

In Bridgewater’s early days, everyone knew each other, so being radically transparent was easy—people could attend the meetings they wanted to and communicate with each other informally. But as we grew, that became logistically impossible, which was a real problem. How could people engage productively with the idea meritocracy if they didn’t know everything that was going on? Without transparency, people would spin whatever happened to suit their own interests, sometimes behind closed doors. Problems would be hidden instead of brought to the surface where they could be resolved.

At Bridgewater, criticism is encouraged, including subordinates criticizing superiors. Do any of your employees ever criticize you? All the time. Can you give me an example? I was in a client meeting with a big European pension fund that was visiting managers in Connecticut. After the meeting, the salesperson criticized me for being inarticulate, running on too long, and adversely affecting the meeting. I asked others who had been at the meeting for their opinions. I was given a grade of “F” by one of our new analysts who was just one year out of school. I loved it because I knew they were helping me improve and that they understood that was what they were supposed to be doing.

as modern portfolio theory. MPT, invented in the 1950s, was a technique to build an investment portfolio by examining the past returns and volatility of disparate asset classes. The trick was to split money among investments that don’t necessarily correlate, or move together, to avoid the chance that any one market event could cause calamity.

Let me hear from you soon, if you are not angry. I have been reading the Bridgewater treatise, and am now trying to understand Prout upon Chemistry. I shall be worth something at last, shall I not? Who knows but what I may die a glorious death under the pons asinorum after all? Prout (if I succeed in understanding him) does not hold that matter is infinitely divisible; and so I suppose the seeds of matter — the ultimate molecules — are a kind of tertium quid between matter and spirit. Certainly I can’t believe that any kind of matter, primal or ultimate, can be indivisible, which it must according to his view. Chalmers’s treatise is, as to eloquence, surpassingly beautiful; as to matter, I could not walk with him all the way, although I longed to do it, for he walked on flowers, and under shade— ‘no tree on which a fine bird did not sit.

b. Constantly think about how to produce leverage. Leverage in an organization is not unlike leverage in the markets; you're looking for ways to achieve more with less. At Bridgewater, I typically work at about 50:1 leverage, meaning that for every hour I spend with each person who works for me, they spend about fifty hours working to move the project along. At our sessions, we go over the vision and the deliverables, then they work on them, and then we review the work, and they move forward based on my feedback- and we do that over and over again. The people who work for me typically have similar relationships with those who work for them, though their ratios are typically between 10:1 and 20:1. I am always eager to find people who can do things nearly as well as (and ideally better than) I can so that I can maximize my output per hour. p515

Looking back on getting fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs said, “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.” I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failed—but that won’t be true unless you give up. Believe it or not, your pain will fade and you will have many other opportunities ahead of you, though you might not see them at the time. The most important thing you can do is to gather the lessons these failures provide and gain humility and radical open-mindedness in order to increase your chances of success. Then you press on. My final lesson was perhaps the most important one, because it has applied again and again throughout my life. At first, it seemed to me that I faced an all-or-nothing choice: I could either take on a lot of risk in pursuit of high returns (and occasionally find myself ruined) or I could lower my risk and settle for lower returns. But I needed to have both low risk and high returns, and by setting out on a mission to discover how I could, I learned to go slowly when faced with the choice between two things that you need that are seemingly at odds. That way you can figure out how to have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t discovered yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you. As difficult as this was, I eventually found a way to have my cake and eat it too. I call it the “Holy Grail of Investing,” and it’s the secret behind Bridgewater’s success.

As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

After the Accident Before we run out of pages, I want to tell you a little of what happened to my family after the accident. My mother moved to a small house in Western Shore. Her first concern was finding a way to support herself and Ricky. Being an ex-dancer, motorcycle rider, and treasure-hunter was not likely to open any doors, so she decided to go back to school. She enrolled in a business course in Bridgewater and began her first studies since she was 12 years old. Soon she earned a diploma in typing, shorthand, and accounting, and was hired to work in a medical clinic. Ricky had been on the island from age nine to 14, mostly in the company of adults--family members and visiting tourists--but hardly ever with anyone his own age. Life on the mainland, with the give and take and bumps and bruises of high-school life was a challenge. But he survived. In time he became a carpenter, and is alive and well and living in Ottawa. My mother made a new life for herself. She remained fiercely independent, but between a job she loved and her neighbors, she formed friendships that were deep and lasting. Of course, she missed Dad and Bobby terribly. My mother and dad had been a perfect match, and my mother and brother had always shared a special bond. Bobby’s death was especially hard on her. My mother felt responsible. One day, before the accident, Bobby had taken all he could of Oak Island. After a heated argument with Dad, Bobby packed up and left. My mother had gone after him and convinced him to return--his dad needed him. She rarely spoke of it, but that weighed heavily on her for the rest of her years. My mother never left the east coast. She was 90 years old when she died. For the last 38 years of her life, she lived in a small house on a hill, in the community of Western Shore, where, from her living room window, she could look out and see Oak Island.

At Bridgewater, every employee has a believability score on a range of dimensions. In sports, statistics for every player’s performance history are public. In baseball, before you sign a player, you can look up his batting average, home runs, and steals; assess his strengths and weaknesses; and adjust accordingly. Dalio wanted Bridgewater to work the same way, so he created baseball cards that display statistics on every employee’s performance, which can be accessed by anyone at the company. If you’re about to interact with a few Bridgewater colleagues for the first time, you can see their track records on seventy-seven different dimensions of values, skills, and abilities in the areas of higher-level thinking, practical thinking, maintaining high standards, determination, open-mindedness yet assertiveness, and organization and reliability.

Although everyone’s opinions are welcome, they’re not all valued equally. Bridgewater is not a democracy. Voting privileges the majority, when the minority might have a better opinion. “Democratic decision making—one person, one vote—is dumb,” Dalio explains, “because not everybody has the same believability.

He gets up ten minutes ahead of me because he has to read the paper first. He scrambles to get to it. By the time I get to see it, it’s all messed up. The sections are all out of order, folded every which way.” —Sally, Bridgewater, NJ

I could look at him unaware. He wasn't flustered like I was. He wasn't embarrassed or mortified.

If I were being totally honest, I wanted his cock pounding me into oblivion so I didn’t have to think about all the bullshit I was dealing with

There were some things a girl just didn't share. Like the fact that I needed wild and crazy monkey sex up against a wall and at least five orgasms.

Bridgewater Triangle down in Massachusetts;

Despite our relatively poor investment performance, 1988 was a great year for Bridgewater, because by reflecting on and learning from our poor performance, we made systematic improvements. I have come to realize that bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons, and not just about business but also about relationships. One has many more supposed friends when one is up than when one is down, because most people like to be with winners and shun losers. True friends are the opposite. I got a lot out of my bad times, not just because they gave me mistakes to learn from but also because they helped me find out who my real friends were—the friends who would be with me through thick and thin.

Conflict, in the Bridgewater culture, is conducted in the service of finding “what is true and what to do about it.

Leeda looked straight out of Martha’s Vineyard---all perfect cheekbones and alabaster skin with a smattering of sun-induced freckles and clothes that were totally season-appropriate. Even loose and sloppy like she was today, she looked like the kind of loose and sloppy you saw in People magazine when they caught a celebrity all tired and mussed up at the airport. Birdie, on the other hand, was curved and rosy and Renoir soft. She looked like the milk-fed farm girl that she was. The two were second cousins but nothing alike. Leeda was straight up and down, and Birdie was as gentle and easy as the rain. Leeda had grown up wearing mostly white and exceeding everyone as the glossiest, the smilingest, and the most southern of the southern belles in Bridgewater. Birdie had grown up with dirt under her fingernails, homeschooled on the orchard, her feet planted in the earth. Before Judge Miller Abbott sentenced Murphy to time on the orchard picking peaches that summer, Murphy had pegged Leeda for uptight and Birdie for weak. But their time together---picking peaches, sweating in the dorms at night, cooling off in the lake---had been like living the fable of her life. The lesson being that when you think you know more than you do, you end up looking like an idiot.

suggestions along the way. Ask what brought them in the door and what would keep them at the firm, and challenge them to think like culture detectives. They can use their insider-outsider perspectives to investigate which practices belong in a museum and which should be kept, as well as potential inconsistencies between espoused and enacted values. 8. Ask for problems, not solutions. If people rush to answers, you end up with more advocacy than inquiry, and miss out on the breadth of knowledge in the room. Following Bridgewater’s issue log, you can create an open document

help them feel valued and gather novel suggestions along the way. Ask what brought them in the door and what would keep them at the firm, and challenge them to think like culture detectives. They can use their insider-outsider perspectives to investigate which practices belong in a museum and which should be kept, as well as potential inconsistencies between espoused and enacted values. 8. Ask for problems, not solutions. If people rush to answers, you end up with more advocacy than inquiry, and miss out on the breadth of knowledge in the room. Following Bridgewater’s issue log, you can create an open document

…Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal our overriding objective is excellence and constant improvement at Bridgewater. To be clear, it’s not to make lots of money. The natural extension of this is not that you should be happy with little money; On the contrary, you should expect to make a lot. If we operate consistently with this philosophy, we should be productive and the company should do well financially. Each person at Bridgewater should act like an owner, responsible for operating in this way, and holding others accountable to operate this way.

As a result of personal losses and the losses of clients, I had to let everyone in my fledgling company Bridgewater Associates go, and was so broke, I had to borrow $4000 from my dad to help pay my family’s bills. At the same time, this was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because it changed my whole approach to decision-making.

Bridgewater’s positive assessment soon became the consensus view in the markets.

Runaway. That's such an ugly word. Ain't it, Dolphin." "That's Dauphin, Dough-fan, Bilgewater." "That's Bridgewater." The Duke looked at me. "Anyway, the King and I have come up with a new business.

Which is why every Bridgewater employee, including Dalio, has a digital "baseball card"--a summary that lists key personality stats the same way a bubblegum card shows a player's batting average and RBI totals. Each employee's baseball card is visible to every other employee--a way for people

In the algorithms of its proprietary systems, the company has recorded all its technical investment knowledge—a set of principles to guide investing. As many as 98 percent of Bridgewater’s financial decisions are executed automatically based on that set of codified market decision rules. In contrast, the “Principles” document—the Bridgewater constitution, which all citizens of the company seek to uphold (or “fight like hell” to change, if they disagree)—is not about the laws of finance, the market economy, or investing. Instead, it’s about the ways people act to foster and preserve a culture of truth and transparency. The principles set a clear bar of excellence for all decision making and are the common textual and conceptual reference for every Bridgewater employee seeking to act in a principled way.

We are shaped by the people and events that came before us: their likes and dislikes, their choice of life partner, the vocations they chose, the events they took part in or caused to happen, and the legacies they left behind.

I know that there are good and bad environments for all asset classes. And I know that in one’s lifetime, there will be a ruinous environment for one of those asset classes. That’s been true throughout history.” Ray Dalio, founder Bridgewater Associates

Popularniejsze od wywoływania pęcherzy było wytwarzanie sączącego się ropnia. Posługując się narzędziem podobnym do skalpela, lekarze nacinali ciało pacjentów „ruchem piłującym”. Następnie wkładano w rozcięcie przedmiot obcy, najczęściej suche ziarna grochu lub fasoli, aby wywołać stan zapalny i sączenie się rany. Lekarz ponownie ją otwierał, często nawet codziennie, przez kilka tygodni lub miesięcy, by nie pozwolić jej się zagoić. Doktor Jonathan Toogood, starszy chirurg w brytyjskim szpitalu w Bridgewater, tak opisał leczenie dwudziestojednoletniej kobiety chorej na przepuklinę: Zrobiłem nacięcie po obu stronach krzywizny, na tyle duże, by w każdym otworze pomieściło się czterdzieści małych ziarenek bobu. Rany te utrzymywano otwarte przez blisko dwa lata. Pacjentka nie była zupełnie uwięziona w domu – w ciągu dnia siedziała na małym fotelu na kółkach, mogła pracować, rysować i się bawić.

Mrs. Brown, I hurried over as soon as I heard..." Ollie Clark ducked through the low front door and removed his hat as he noticed Lily sitting in the old rocker she had brought with her from Mississippi. His gaze stopped at the child at her feet. "Come in, Mr. Clark, have a seat. You've had word of Jim?" Lily’s breath caught in her lungs as she waited for the words she didn't want to hear. Ollie took the overlarge wing chair that had once decorated a bedroom parlor and wrung his hat between his hands. "No, ma'am, I didn't mean to get your hopes up none. I was talkin' 'bout Cade. The boys were just funnin' about him the other day. He's a drunken half-breed, Mrs. Brown. You don't want the likes of him about the place. Let me explain things to him and send him on his way. It ain't right for a respectable lady like yourself to have to deal with a man like that." "I can't dismiss a man without giving him a chance, Mr. Clark. Even drunk, he's showed more sense than some sober men I could name. If Colonel Martin could use him, I don't see why I can't." He took a deep breath. "He ain't even white, Lily. You'll give me permission to call you Lily?" When she didn't reply, Ollie hurried on. "He's half-Indian, half-Mexican. You'd be better off hiring one of your father's slaves. At least they listen when you whip them. Cade's more likely to turn and kill you. He's done it before. You've got to get him out of here." Ollie was speaking sense from his own point of view. Beneath his placid exterior. Cade undoubtedly had a violent temper. Lily had seen evidence of that already. And Ralph had told her he'd been in prison for killing another man. So Ollie was speaking the truth, but only one side of the truth. Lily knew all about that kind of lie. "I'll give Cade his chance, Mr. Clark. Jim would want it that way." Lily watched gleefully as she used this two-edged sword to make Clark squirm. How many times had she resentfully heard those words when the men wouldn't listen to her? Clark scowled and rose. "Jim wouldn't have taken on a drunken Indian. I'll set about finding you a decent man to help out. You'll be needing him soon enough." He gave the child on the floor another glance, one of puzzlement, but he didn't ask the question that obviously was on his mind. And Lily didn't answer it. Sweetly, she held out her hand and offered her best Southern-belle smile. "I'm so grateful for your concern, Mr. Clark. Please do come and visit sometime. Perhaps you could bring Miss Bridgewater. I'd be happy for the company." The name of the young girl whom the town gossip had Clark courting only brought a milder frown to his handsome face. "That's mighty kind of you, Mrs. Brown. I hope you hear from Jim soon." Lily watched him go with a sigh of relief and a small sense of triumph. She didn't know why Ollie Clark was suddenly so all-fired concerned with her welfare, but surely she had set him properly in his place. Now,

You really married to an Indian?" The woman's curiosity, once released, was unquenchable. "I am married to a man." Lily slapped the bolt on the counter. "Let me see your threads and buttons." When Lily finally left with her purchases, Cade was leaning against the storefront, hands in pockets, watching Roy lead Serena around on his pony. At Lily's appearance, he stood up and grabbed the packages. In doing so, he bent near her ear and whispered, "A man, Lily?" "A stupid one," she responded, sticking her nose up and heading for the wagon. "Not as stupid as Clark. I didn't let you go." Undaunted, Cade flung the packages in the wagon and helped Lily up. "Ollie isn't dumb. He's a coward. He lost Miss Bridgewater because he was terrified to court her. She married a lesser man out of desperation. I cannot imagine how he found the gumption to come out and visit me the few times he did." Cade had a thought or two on that himself, but he had as yet been unable to confirm them. Whistling to himself, he disregarded Lily's insult and allowed the balm of her approval to ease an earlier pain.

That night, a cold breeze swept into Bridgewater. The leaves went fluttering like butterflies, and Judge Abbott began to have what he later called “the orchard dreams.” Every night far into the following year, he dreamed of Jodee McGowen reclining nude by the Smoaky Lake, like she was Eve lying in a cluster of reeds in the oldest garden in the world.

Polaroid never systematically engaged canaries to call out problems. In contrast, Bridgewater is designed to be a whole company of canaries.

At Bridgewater, every employee has a believability score on a range of dimensions. In sports, statistics for every player’s performance history are public.

Ask for problems, not solutions. If people rush to answers, you end up with more advocacy than inquiry, and miss out on the breadth of knowledge in the room. Following Bridgewater’s issue log, you can create an open document for teams to flag problems that they see. On a monthly basis, bring people together to review them and figure out which ones are worth solving.

She would let him remain, like a ghost haunting her, for how can you delete someone from your heart?

Negative thoughts are like weeds; they can quickly multiply and consume the gardens of our minds.

As Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.

Meaulnes,

Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Ray Dalio, cochairman of the massive Bridgewater hedge fund, have consistently portrayed China as an unquestionably positive economic force.

Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, for example, places a high premium on what he calls “radical open-mindedness,” by which he means something qualitatively beyond a mere willingness to listen to a competing view when and if it comes to call. “To be radically open-minded,” he says, “you need to be so open to the possibility that you might be making a mistake and/or that you have a weakness that you encourage others to tell you so.

Often lost in the simplistic outrage that sexual crimes elicits, is an understanding of the complexity of an offenders’ future and those they call family. Offenders are also brothers, children, wives, fathers and significant others. When these offenders return to the community after their criminal sentence, they will begin to restructure their lives to try and become productive citizens. Their families and support systems also face a set of challenges. Dr. Zilney’s thoughtful and well-organized work documents the many unintended consequences of our prolonged, entrenched sex offender laws and its impact on not only the offenders, but their support systems. Humanizing and contextualizing people who have committed real harm is an important social goal. Dr. Zilney’s research not only accomplishes this but equally importantly requires us to rethink how we help support these people and their families in developing healthy and safe relationships. Richard G. Wright, Ph.D., Bridgewater State University

Life is a mirror. The face you put into it, is the one you will see