Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

If you were to pick the high point of David McCormick’s career in finance, it might’ve come on a bright summer day in 2019 at the Belle Haven Club, a Gatsby-esque waterside retreat in Greenwich, Conn., that’s popular with local billionaires. Among them on this occasion was McCormick’s boss, Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. Dalio had gathered the financial elites of Bridgewater and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and brought in Harry Connick Jr. for entertainment, to celebrate McCormick’s marriage to Dina Powell, who’d recently left a top role in Donald Trump’s administration to return to Goldman.

It was a moment of personal redemption for McCormick. Hired as Bridgewater’s president in 2009, he’d survived a full decade at a firm whose paranoid, contentious style is the stuff of legend. Dalio enforces a culture of “radical transparency” in which employees are encouraged to make unvarnished criticisms of one another, “so there’s no bullshit,” as Dalio puts it. He’s compared this process—favorably—to a pack of hyenas taking down a wildebeest. “This type of apparently ‘cruel’ behavior exists throughout the animal kingdom,” he wrote in a manifesto laying out his management principles. “Like death itself it is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life.” At Bridgewater, the aim of this Darwinian struggle is to foster a Spock-like intellectual rigor shorn of human emotional frailty, to better focus the firm on generating returns.

Not everybody loves it. Some past employees liken Bridgewater to a cult. As a former executive elaborated to AR, a hedge fund trade magazine, “It’s isolated, it has a charismatic leader, and it has its own dogma.” Employees are known to cry in meetings. Not surprisingly, Bridgewater has a steep attrition rate. It’s been reported that about 40% of new hires from outside companies quit or are fired within a year. And the casualties can include senior executives, as McCormick almost found out. After he rose quickly to become co‑chief executive officer, the hyenas came for him. He received subpar feedback, including from Dalio, and was unceremoniously demoted. “Ray basically came in and fired me,” McCormick told Bloomberg Businessweek in a recent interview. [Continue reading…]