Bridgewater Co-CEO Mark Bertolini on the Value of ‘Radical Transparency’ and Taking Over From Ray Dalio
Bertolini was named co-CEO of the world's largest hedge fund earlier this year. Here's how he approaches leadership.
Earlier this year, Mark Bertolini was named co-CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. With $150 billion under management, Bridgewater is known for its unusual culture around “radical transparency.”
Bertolini saw this in action during his first board meeting at Bridgewater. There was a discussion around conflict of interest, but Bertolini wasn’t participating. Suddenly, he got a notification on his iPad from a fellow colleague that gave him a rating of “4” and a message that read, “You know more about this than all of us put together. Open your mouth.”
This is an example of Bridgewater’s famous “Dot Collector” system at work. It allows anyone in the organization to give managers and colleagues alike real-time feedback.
“You get scored every time you open your mouth,” Bertolini told The Profile in an interview. “The idea of radical transparency is not to be brutally truthful, it’s to share your thinking and make your thinking accessible to everybody.”
To Bertolini, company-wide transparency is important for two reasons. One, he says, you could make an insight that would better serve clients, and two, getting live feedback forces you to sharpen your thinking and learn.
Bertolini and his co-CEO Nir Bar Dea inherited the top job from Bridgewater’s billionaire founder Ray Dalio. Bertolini was an interesting choice for the role because he doesn’t come from the world of asset management.
Prior to Bridgewater, he was the CEO of health insurer Aetna. During his tenure, Aetna experienced an average of 20% annual growth of earnings per share, and the company’s revenue was up about 85%. Prior to leaving the top post, Bertolini shepherded a $69-billion sale of Aetna to CVS Health.
Though he comes from corporate America, Bertolini doesn't match the image you have of a buttoned-up, clean-cut Fortune 500 CEO. Known for sporting tattoos, leather jackets, and a large skull ring, Bertolini is a self-described "radical capitalist."
Radical capitalism refers to the actions he took in the workplace before it was cool to do so. He raised the minimum wage, waived out-of-pocket costs, paid back student loans, and invested further in the development of his employees.
But he wasn’t always this enlightened leader. In his early career, Bertolini was unapologetically competitive, aggressive, and at times, ruthless. He was so well known for his bare-knuckled, iron-fist leadership that his employees had given him the moniker, "Darth Vader.”
"People used to hum the Darth Vader tune when I walked through the building because I was exacting,” he says.
In this conversation, we talk about the two life-altering wake-up calls that forced him to change his leadership style, why he’s inspired by Eastern philosophy, and what he hopes to achieve at Bridgewater in the coming years.
This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
(Below is an excerpt of the interview, but I encourage you to listen and watch to the full interview below.)
🎧 LISTEN.
🎬 WATCH.
Tell me about your ski accident in 2004.
BERTOLINI: I hit a tree, slid headfirst down into a river, and broke my neck in five places.
For two hours, they tried to figure out how to get me out without killing me. On the way to the hospital, they gave me last rites in the helicopter because they didn't think I was going to make it. I woke up seven days later, and a nurse was giving me a sponge bath and I went, “What are you doing,” and went running out of the room.
I didn't have any pain for like a month and a half because I was so traumatized. I mean, I was so banged up. And then when everything settled, I was in immense pain. I mean, immense pain. Even until three months ago, I was in chronic severe pain every day.
From my left ear down to my fingertips, it felt like my arm was on fire all day long. Initially, I was on seven different drugs, including Dilaudid, fentanyl, OxyContin Gabapentin, Neurontin, and a whole bunch of others. And I was still in pain. The pain didn’t go away.
I was on the verge of hurting myself. I was on the side of the freeway in my BMW 740. It was two o'clock in the morning. I had found a bridge that was not covered by a guardrail, and I was getting ready to hit the accelerator and hit it at 100 miles an hour — or more.
And then a police car pulled up behind me. He said, “What are you doing here?” And I had a neck brace on, I had an arm brace, and I was full of narcotics. And I said, “I'm going to kill myself.”
And he goes, “Should you be driving?” I said, “Probably not.” So they got me out of the car, drove it home, put it in the garage, took the keys and my license and said, ‘Your wife can come get them tomorrow, but you shouldn't be driving anymore until you’re off the drugs.’
I realized that I had to find a way out, and a friend recommended Craniosacral therapy [a form of bodywork that aims to ease tension around the brain and spinal cord using noninvasive touch]. And so I went to see a Craniosacral therapist, and within three or four months, I was off the drugs.
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(To better manage his pain without the help of painkillers, Bertolini turned to yoga and mindfulness. He began reading the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, studying Sanskrit, attending yoga retreats, and learning chants.
As the CEO of Aetna, Bertolini began making changes from within. While the company was thriving, its employees were not, many of them using Medicaid and food stamps. He revamped employee benefits that included a minimum wage increase to $16 an hour and implemented yoga and meditation classes.)
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If you hadn't had that experience with your injury, would you have ever become this mission-driven leader?
No. It knocked the hell out of me. You know, it knocked out all the narcissism, it knocked out that I knew everything.
Earlier this year, you were named co-CEO of Bridgewater. How did this role come about and why were you interested in it?
I always hated hedge funds. And so you know, I get a call and Ray Dalio wants to have a drink. So I go meet him, and I'm thinking, ‘Why am I doing this? It’s a hedge fund. I hate them.’
He started talking about what his company was about, and one of the more amazing things is that the largest piece of our business is a hedge fund, but our customers keep us because of the insights we give them about the markets and the economy and where the world’s headed. That's been Ray’s greatest gift.
So we have a philosophy statement that we're going to have pervasive excellence based on radical transparency and an idea meritocracy where nobody has any stripes. And because of that, we'll generate great returns through great relationships with our clients and each other, and that will generate money that we can earn to sustain the company.
Are there any changes that you aim to implement as a leader at Bridgewater?
When you have an organization that's led by an iconic founder, for 40-something years, things like talent, development, and succession take a backseat. Now that Ray is part of a transition of leadership, we now need to be led by a group that builds succession and continuity for the organization intentionally versus being identified by the founder as somebody that's worthy to lead.
And how do you do that?
You have to build all that structure. In an organization like ours, we've got 1,100 people, 1,200 people, we're trading in 200 liquid markets around the world every day. In a systematic process, the machine does it, and it's all about building the machine, right? When you do that, you got to actually have intentionality around diversity, around the level of talent, around development plans.
But when it's a founder at the table, saying, ‘Here's what we're going to do today, and here's what we're going to do tomorrow,’ there's less of a focus on group learning and management process, and those sorts of things.
You don't want to break it by making it institutionalized. It’s a small company — everybody knows everybody else. We can pick up the phone, we can walk into our office. That's what the idea meritocracy is — it's about the idea, not about your position in the organization. And so this ability to work together collegially — but to still have some formalized processes in the organization that weren't necessarily needed before — are the things that we're building.
What does the word success mean to you?
Impact. I want to share ideas that people make better. I don’t want to be remembered for my name, I want to be remembered for the idea. If the idea does something to change the world and make it a better place, that will have been impact.