My Last Year And My Greatest Challenge

The transition wasn’t going as smoothly as they had imagined. Technology and recruiting were the pain areas for Ray and team. Hence, they needed to change the CEO. Greg and Murray who were Bridgewater CEO at that time (2016), were over burdened and hence a committee was formed in order to look out for alternatives. It was finally decided that Greg would step out as co-CEO and Ray would step in again along with Murray to co-manage the company. Ray states that it was a very difficult decision to let Greg step out of the day-to-day management of the company.

Though, Greg would still be the head of investments, however, removing him from such an important post was a big decision. It needed to be taken for the betterment of the entire company.

The chapter quotes Jim Collins (management expert), “to transition well, there are only two things that you need to do, Put capable CEOs in place and have a capable governance system to replace the CEO if they’re not capable”. This means that having a system in place can be substituted for talent as well. Something as qualitative as people management can be systematized by organizations in order to standardize the day to day management activities.

Finally post creation of a systematic process, Ray appointed David McCormick and Eileen Murray as co-CEOs and himself resigned from the organization in April 2017.