His new book is more significant than the original list of principles: It is part memoir, part how-to guide. It is a deeply personal story, with Mr. Dalio wading into how he started his firm in 1975, internal conflicts inside the company and strife early on in his career. The book is both instructive and surprisingly moving.

At its core, the story traces Mr. Dalio’s own evolution. And he is convinced that we learn much more from our mistakes than from our successes. It is a point worth lingering on, because it is rarely given enough consideration.

In a particularly telling moment, Mr. Dalio describes how his fund nearly imploded in the early 1980s on bad bets on the bond market, a period he acknowledges was like “blows to the head with a baseball bat.”

“Being so wrong — and especially so publicly wrong — was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything,” he wrote. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. I was so broke I couldn’t muster enough money to pay for an airplane ticket to Texas to visit a prospective client.”

Mr. Dalio has long been an object of fascination because of the seemingly grand social experiment he has been running inside Bridgewater: The firm explicitly requires its 1,500 employees to follow the “Principles,” sometimes leading to uncomfortable confrontations. Virtually all conversations and meetings are recorded so that employees can view them later, a practice that some critics liken to Big Brother. Some employees use an app to score their co-workers’ arguments in real time. And all of this data is then gathered and analyzed to see how the firm can improve.

Image Mr. Dalio, whose new book will be published Sept. 19, said he wanted to find a way for people to “get past their own ego barriers.”

Of course, the larger question is whether Mr. Dalio’s version of utopia — a place where employees feel comfortable offering blunt and in some cases brutal feedback — can exist outside Bridgewater’s controlled environment of mostly self-selecting individuals who either embrace the philosophy or quickly exit. Given the intense environment, as you might expect, there are horror stories of employees who have left in tears. Turnover among new employees is high.