The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock

The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock

• “The better an organization is, the less obvious it is,” he says. “In Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization and keep it that way. It’s the results, not the structure or management that should be apparent.” Today the Visa organization that Hock founded is not only performing brilliantly, it is also almost mythic, one of only two examples that experts regularly cite to illustrate how the dynamic principles of chaos theory can be applied to business.

• Sounds like Da Vinci – He’d been a passionate reader since before he could remember, even though his formal schooling ended after two years at a community college. He read history, economics, politics, science, philosophy, poetry — anything and everything, without paying the slightest attention to disciplinary boundaries.

•  He convinced him that the command-and-control model of organization that had grown up to support the industrial revolution had gotten out of hand. It simply didn’t work. Command-and-control organizations, Hock says, “were not only archaic and increasingly irrelevant. They were becoming a public menace, antithetical to the human spirit and destructive of the biosphere. I was convinced we were on the brink of an epidemic of institutional failure.” He also had a deep conviction that if he ever got to create an organization, things would be different. He would try to conceive it based on biological concepts and metaphors.

• Hock designed the organization according to his philosophy: highly decentralized and highly collaborative. Authority, initiative, decision making, wealth — everything possible is pushed out to the periphery of the organization, to the members. This design resulted from the need to reconcile a fundamental tension. On the one hand, the member financial institutions are fierce competitors: they — not Visa — issue the cards, which means they are constantly going after each other’s customers. On the other hand, the members also have to cooperate with each other: for the system to work, participating merchants must be able to take any Visa card issued by any bank, anywhere.

• Lao Tse, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson concepts are incorporated…For example, instead of trying to enforce cooperation by restricting what the members can do, the Visa bylaws encourage them to compete and innovate as much as possible. “Members are free to create, price, market, and service their own products under the Visa name,” he says. “At the same time, in a narrow band of activity essential to the success of the whole, they engage in the most intense cooperation.” Thisharmonious blend of cooperation and competition is what allowed the system to expand worldwide in the face of different currencies, languages, legal codes, customs, cultures, and political philosophies.

• in an acceptance speech as a laureate of the Business Hall of Fame, Hock put it this way: “Through the years, I have greatly feared and sought to keep at bay the four beasts that inevitably devour their keeper — Ego, Envy, Avarice, and Ambition. In 1984, I severed all connections with business for a life of isolation and anonymity, convinced I was making a great bargain by trading money for time, position for liberty, and ego for contentment — that the beasts were securely caged.”

• Santa Fe Institute and its work on “the edge of chaos”: the notion that healthy, adaptive systems will always exhibit a kind of dynamic tension between chaos and order. It fit in beautifully with the dynamic tension that he’d set up in Visa: encourage as much competition and initiative as possible throughout the organization — “chaos” — while building in mechanisms for cooperation — “order.

• Visa notwithstanding, democracy in the workplace still sounds like a recipe for dithering and paralysis. It also ignores certain verities of human nature.