The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock

Hock's message has resonated most strongly in this emerging arena of distributed, networked organizations. Take the Appleseed Foundation, a public-interest group created in 1993 by consumer activist Ralph Nader and some of his classmates from the Harvard Law School class of 1958. Their idea was to create a network of state and local Appleseed Centers close to communities and responsive to their concerns, to tackle systemic problems in society: education, the cities, campaign finance reform.

Hock entered the picture in mid-1994, when Deborah Leff, president of the Joyce Foundation, introduced him to Ralph Nader. Once Hock, the former businessman, had finished bristling at the thought of Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, he was delighted to discover that their thinking about institutions and centralized power was on exactly the same wavelength. In the spring of 1995 Appleseed began working with Hock on his purpose and principles process.

If nothing else, says Appleseed Board Member James Hostetler of the Washington law firm Kirkland and Ellis, that experience ended up enriching their notion of what systemic institutional change might really mean. "Dee gave us a language and a methodology to approach the issue of organizational change in a much more systematic way than I would have thought possible," Hostetler says.

At the same time, adds Appleseed Executive Director Linda Singer, Hock was leading them to rethink their own operations. By that point a number of statewide Appleseed Centers were already up and running -- and the board was spending more and more time worrying how to keep them from undertaking non-Appleseedish activities. "Dee made us see that the state centers had an equally valid concern," says Singer. "What if the national organization goes astray?"

So now the organization is being reconceived with a core board of directors composed primarily of representatives of participant centers -- an idea that had never occurred to the organizers. In fact, says Singer, Hock even convinced them that one of the big things they were worried about -- that various Appleseed Centers might end up opposing each other on certain issues -- was in fact an opportunity: "It's a recipe for innovation," she says. "Competition and dialogue is how you get new ideas."

Appleseed, of course, was already a going concern by the time Hock appeared, albeit a very new one. In the case of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA), however, Hock has been helping create an organization from scratch.

The process began in 1994 when Getzendanner put him in touch with Peter Shelley of the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston. Hock was wondering if a Visa-like organization might help in environmental conflicts by giving the various sides a way to resolve disputes before they went for each other's throats. Shelley replied that he had a perfect case: the fisheries of the Gulf of Maine and neighboring Canadian waters, historically among the most bountiful on earth, were on the verge of collapse after decades of overharvesting. Yet the fishermen, who were acutely aware of the problem, had been unable to overcome their own divisions enough to change things. Not only had they inherited a centuries-old tradition of individualism fierce enough to make the Old West cowboys look like socialists, but also the gill-netters were at odds with the bottom-draggers, who were at odds with the lobstermen -- on and on.

They were united only by a general suspicion of environmental groups, and a very specific loathing for the New England Regional Fishery Management Council, a federally mandated panel that sets limits on the harvesting of various fish species, and that was widely regarded as hopelessly politicized, obtuse, and out of touch. What was needed, said Shelley, was some way of getting all these parties into a dialogue so that they could begin to work together.

Hock was happy to oblige. Shelley arranged a meeting with several dozen fishermen, lobstermen, and others who were willing to listen. Hock made quite an impression. For one thing, his story of interbank warfare and the near-collapse of the credit-card industry in the 1960s sounded remarkably like their own plight. For another, says Shelley, "They didn't perceive him as an academic, theoretical egghead who'd come up with some idea and was trying to sell it to them. He had Visa under his belt. And he emphasized his own dirty-fingernails background, which made a difference. He treated them with a lot of respect."

Building on that start, NAMA has now gone through Hock's purpose and principles stages -- yes, with strong fishermen sometimes close to tears -- and has begun to grapple with more specific organizational issues: whether and how the group should get into political activism, for example, or how it might begin to organize and enforce voluntary limits on the catch.