Bridgewater Associates and the "soul of a hedgefund 'machine'"

An interesting look inside Bridgewater and its founder Ray Dalio - particularly as I've been doing a lot of research lately about systematization and processes (WSJ):

How do you build the world's largest hedge fund? Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio says he did it by creating a culture of "radical truth and radical transparency." Mr. Dalio's perhaps radical belief is that "everything is a machine"—including organizations and even the individual people within them. At his firm's Westport, Conn., headquarters, we are discussing the human machines at Bridgewater and the equally fascinating machine known as the U.S. economy.

As for the people at his firm, the idea is to encourage everyone to accept unvarnished criticism as a treasured opportunity to learn and to solve problems. This is intended to allow constant refinement of business processes—also known as machines within the firm—from how Bridgewater buys office furniture to how it evaluates the world oil market.

But human machines don't always welcome complete candor. And at Bridgewater they have to get used to internal software that conducts a non-stop evaluation of their performance based on daily entries from colleagues and even rates their credibility on particular issues. This doesn't mean the software makes all decisions. When the system recently reported that the company's head receptionist was underperforming, executives decided that it was a case of the software not being calibrated to effectively measure her work.