The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock

It also works. Visa grew phenomenally during the 1970s, from a few hundred members to tens of thousands. And it did so more or less smoothly, without dissolving into fiefdoms and turf wars. By the early 1980s, in fact, the Visa system had surpassed MasterCard as the largest in the world. It had begun to fulfill Hock's vision of a universal currency, transcending national boundaries. And Dee Hock was seen as the system's essential man.

"Utter nonsense," Hock says. "It's the organizational concepts and ideas that were essential. I merely came to symbolize them. Such organizations should be management-proof."

In May 1984, at 55, Hock put his beliefs to the test. He resigned from Visa and three months later, with his successor in place, dropped completely from sight. Six years later, 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."

Visa never missed a beat.

Thinking back on that particular Saturday afternoon at the Santa Fe Institute -- March 13, 1993 -- Joel Getzendanner remembers his first reaction: "Oh great! A banker."

At the time, Getzendanner was vice president for programs at the Joyce Foundation, a midsized philanthropic organization in Chicago. Its motto: "Putting the next generation of policy ideas into practice." After five years there, trying to stimulate those new ideas in areas such as environmental policy, K-12 school reform, and inner city economic development, he was getting discouraged. "The issues were real," he sighs, "but we weren't making much progress."

That's why he found himself at the Santa Fe Institute: he was looking for fresh thinking and unusual insight. The little New Mexico think tank, founded a decade earlier by scientists from nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, had gained celebrity status among the digital elite based on its innovative thinking about economies, social interactions, organizations, brains, ecosystems -- any kind of system that seemed to be complex, adaptive, and self-organizing. Getzendanner particularly liked the way the Santa Fe Institute's collection of prizewinning thinkers and scientists tried to deal with issues in all their complex messiness, instead of oversimplifying them.

Which is why he was underwhelmed at the suggestion that he chat with another visitor, a former banker named Dee Hock. Insight was not what he expected to hear from a banker.

Of course, says Getzendanner, he later realized that Hock had been thinking, "Oh great! A foundation executive!"

Soon both men found reason to reconsider. Hock had read about the 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."

Hock had even coined a new word to describe this kind of tension. A system that was both chaotic and ordered was "chaordic." Thus you had the "Visa chaord," the "brain chaord," and so on. When he gave the dinner speech that evening at the Santa Fe Institute, he used the word in public for the first time.

"At first I thought it was just cute," says Getzendanner. "But then I began to realize it was profound." Hock's description of how Visa couldn't be designed from the top down, because banks and payment systems were so different in each jurisdiction, matched Getzendanner's experience. In every area where the Joyce Foundation was active, that was the problem. In inner city development, for example, every individual's needs and situations are different; yet the old-line, Great Society-style programs force everyone into lock step -- and quash individual initiative. Or in public education, where educational decisions really need to be made as close as possible to the individual student -- and almost never are.

"As he told me the Visa story," says Getzendanner, "I started getting a sense that this is an enormous institution, and yet it distributes power in a way I'd never heard of. And I realized that here were some ideas that might be meaningful to what we were trying to do at Joyce."