The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock

The list goes on and on. Since the Joyce Foundation sent him on the road in 1994, Hock has started working with a wide variety of groups. He says that he now gets about five invitations per week to come spread the gospel.

Of course, Hock is the first to admit that there's a long way to go. For example, none of the organizations he's worked with has gotten much beyond the purpose and principles stage, even after a year or more of work.

Once they get into the specifics of organizational design, they have to figure out in detail how to take Visa's patented mix of Lao Tse, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, and map it from the for-profit banking world to the public-interest sector, as in Appleseed, or to an all-volunteer organization, as in NAMA. It's not always clear how to do that.

On the other hand, says Hock, "What the Visa story does is give validity that these things can happen. If an ordinary vice president of an obscure bank in Seattle can do it, then anybody can."

Furthermore, he says, each success will teach us a little more about how to do it next time. "The concepts of chaordic organizations will take a century or more to mature. The idea is a baby, like a daughter or a son. We can have a vision of what it will eventually be. But we won't see that in our lifetime. That's the fun of it, the mystery. That's why this kind of thinking becomes so enormously exciting, serious, and playful at the same time."

And he adds a caution. "It's a very difficult way to start thinking," he says. "I warn people: don't start this lightly. Because once you start, it'll put a burr under your mental saddle. It will call into question all your beliefs about organizations and management. You'll never think about them in the same way again."

M. Mitchell Waldrop (mmwaldrop@msn.com) writes on science and technology from Washington, D.C. He is the author of "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos" (Simon and Schuster, 1992) and "The Technology of Enchantment" (Hyperion, 1997).

Dee Hock on Management

Dee Hock on Organizations