The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock

And Getzendanner was already flipping through his Rolodex, coming up with people for Hock to see. "And so," Hock says, "I set out on an odyssey more improbable than Visa and infinitely more important. For the first time, I knew what my life was all about. Everything else was preparatory. I expect to pursue those objectives for the remainder of my days." And eighteen months and hundreds of meetings later, Hock became convinced that there was some chance the four objectives could be realized.

A Portrait of Dee Hock, Giving it 110%:

"This is going to be the hardest work you'll ever do," he says. It is a promise he makes to every group he works with. "Most of you will want to quit. And before it's over, quite a few of you will."

Why? Because he's got no intention of giving you a precise organizational plan and telling you how to implement it -- not even the Visa plan. For one thing, the Visa bylaws were designed for credit cards; they aren't transferable. For another, the world changes too fast, making detailed plans obsolete before you can implement them. No, he says: "Far better than a precise plan is a clear sense of direction and compelling beliefs. And that lies within you. The question is, how do you evoke it?"

To start with, he says, "unless we can define a purpose for this organization that we can all believe in, we might as well go home." That's "purpose" as in, "We the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union .... " The purpose has to be an authentic statement of what the organization is about, not some platitude cooked up by a consultant.

Next, you're going to have to agree on a set of principles for the organization. That's "principles" as in, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal .... " Again, this isn't a bunch of platitudes, but a manifesto of what the people in the organization believe in and care about in their gut. And getting there is going to be downright excruciating. You're going to struggle to articulate things you never even knew you felt. How do you really feel about power, for example, or autonomy, or job security, or how the money flows?

Executives and secretaries alike are going to find themselves breaking down in tears. It's going to take a year -- or more. But it's absolutely essential. Because what we're trying to do is build a community. And it's only when that community has solid agreement on purposes and principles that you can start talking about the concept and structure of the organization.

Standard facilitator-babble?

Hardly, says MIT's Peter Senge, who has been through the process himself. "I first started taking Dee seriously when I heard him say, 'We spent a year developing a purpose and principles statement for Visa.' That's not window dressing," says Senge. "He really means you to blow up the whole organization. He really wants you to dissolve the power relationships -- everything."

In effect, Senge explains, Hock is looking to transform the workplace from a dictatorship, however benign, to something resembling a democracy. Of course, when you put it that way, Hock's vision may sound naive. Senge admits that the typical immediate gut reaction is, "This ain't the way business works."

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

Not so long ago, says Senge, Hock was addressing an audience full of CEOs. And he really had them pumping: "Great! This is how to create a learning organization that can grow at 20% per year! He's found the keys to the kingdom!" That is, until the end, when he told them about the one little problem: "You'll never be able to justify paying a CEO $1 million a year to run this kind of corporation."

"You could almost see the excitement ebbing," says Senge.

And yet -- it may not be entirely crazy. There are good reasons to think that notions like "empowerment" and "decentralization" are not just the latest management fad. In a business environment marked by information technology, global competition, and fast-paced change, weblike networks are emerging not only among businesses forming strategic partnerships, but also among environmental, human-rights, and other activist groups -- even among government agencies seeking to short-circuit the bureaucracy and get something done.

It's not so crazy to think of Visa -- "the corporation whose product is coordination" -- as a model for how these networked organizations of the future could be managed. As Hock says, "Inherent in Visa is the archetype of the organization of the 21st century."