You can watch this Meme Lesson on Feedback on YouTube.

The last story should scare every HR person. It's about a company that followed every rule in the book on feedback perfectly, at an industrial scale, and built a nightmare.

Bridgewater Associates. The world's largest hedge fund — $150 billion under management. And for most of its history, the most notorious workplace in American finance.

Ray Dalio, the founder, believed exactly what this lesson has been preaching — feedback should be constant, unflinching, and never polite.

He wrote his method down in a 500-page document called Principles, which every new employee was required to read and live by.

He installed iPads on every desk with an app called the Dot Collector, which allowed employees to rate each other on 75 attributes — open-mindedness, conceptual thinking, willing to touch the nerve, managerial courage — on a scale of one to ten, in real time, during every meeting.

Dalio himself could be rated. He famously gave a TED talk in which a 24-year-old new recruit had given him a three out of ten.

On paper, this is the feedback system this lesson has been arguing for, at industrial scale. 

Based on observed patterns rather than recency.

Impossible to contaminate with managerial mood, because the feedback is data, not opinion. 

The camera test is applied to every moment of every working day, with the camera literally switched on.

It should have been a paradise of development.

It was described by people who worked there as a "cauldron of fear and intimidation."

Former employees described struggle sessions in which an individual was put on trial in front of the entire firm, recorded and archived for future reference.

About a quarter of new employees left within eighteen months.

The DOs work only inside an environment of moral seriousness. 

Specific behaviour-based feedback is useful when it is used to help the person grow. It is abusive when it is used to demonstrate the manager's power, or to produce data for a sorting algorithm, or to perform the ritual of transparency without the substance of care.

The camera test is a technique.

It does not replace morality.

It does not replace the need to be a good person.

Bridgewater still manages $150 billion.

Dalio retired in 2022 as one of the richest men in finance.

The feedback system produced real returns for real clients.

It also produced real damage to real people.