The Art of Smart

Dee W. Hock

Founder and CEO Emeritus
Visa International
Olympia, Washington

You can't unlearn anything. Most of what organizations call "unlearning" is superficial -- just slapping a new label on an old can of beans. We are what we experience and learn. We learn how to view the world and make sense of it. What we learn makes us who we are. We can't unlearn that. That learning process helps us gradually, and usually unconsciously, compose an internal model of reality -- our perspective. Unfortunately, perspective is a fun-house mirror: It distorts and discolors everything we see, learn, and experience. Perspective warps our perception and makes it difficult to view things accurately or conceive of them in new ways. It is the Achilles' heel of the mind.

When external events -- the world around us -- change and no longer fit our internal model, we start to blunder. Life gets messy. We become confused, stressed, and anxious. Rather than alter our perspective, we try to force others to conform to it.

We tend to fall in love with the things that we think are true. We treasure those truths. Gradually, they become old and shabby, and they lose their utility. But they are comfortable, and we can't bear to part with them. We clutter our mind with so much old stuff that there is no room for anything new. We can't discard mental "stuff." But we can create a mental attic and put a sign on the door that says, "Things I know that are no longer so." Call all those old, best-loved ideas into question. Until you understand your thinking about a certain thing, you'll never change. So question that habit of mind, and lug it into the attic if it's no longer useful. Don't try to get rid of it; just refuse to dwell within it any longer.

Change is not about understanding new things or having new ideas; it's about seeing old things with new eyes -- from different perspectives. Change is not about reorganizing, reengineering, reinventing, recapitalizing. It's about reconceiving! When you reconceive something -- a thought, a situation, a corporation, a product -- you create a whole new order. Do that, and creativity will flood your mind.

Change can be exhilarating, joyous, liberating. But it can also be terrifying, because, in a deeper sense, you are questioning your very identity and sense of value. But take the risk. It's worth it.

Dee Hock (deehock@chaordic.com) guided the Visa organization through several innovations. He also founded the Chaordic Alliance, a global enterprise that links people and organizations in an effort to develop, disseminate, and implement more effective and equitable models for commercial, political, and social institutions.

Jason Olim

President and CEO
CDnow Inc.
Fort Washington, Pennsylvania

I'm 29 years old, and I run a $100 million public company. What did I know walking into all of this? Not much.

I started CDnow with my twin brother, Matthew, in the basement of our parents' home. But the company's gangbuster growth has forced me to change my entrepreneurial mind-set and to unlearn a lot of habits and beliefs that were integral to its initial success. One such belief was the infamous entrepreneur's mantra: If you don't do it, it won't get done right. But now, as CEO, I've learned that my role is less about what I can do and more about what the organization can do. That fundamental change in my beliefs led to a fundamental change in my behavior. For instance, instead of going straight to the crisis of the moment, rolling up my sleeves, and telling everyone what to do, I now wait for the people involved to come tell me their solution.

My most telling moment happened about two years ago. My own brother forbade me to modify a piece of code that I'd written to resize the album-cover graphics on the company's Web site. As head of our technology group, he told me that I had no right to disturb his team's process. Of course, he was right. But it was a hard pill to swallow.

More recently, we completed a successful merger with N2K Inc. -- CDnow's fiercest competitor for the past several years. There's nothing like a good M&A to force some serious reevaluation. I saw that most clearly in our decision-making processes. At N2K, decisions are made closer to the troops, which makes it a nimble organization -- except when those decisions aren't integrated effectively at the top. In our process, decisions travel far up the chain of command, which sometimes slows us down -- but that also means decisions are accepted throughout the whole organization. We've started the process of unlearning that either one of those ways is always the best. And that has allowed us to learn how to blend the best of both worlds.

Jason Olim (jolim@cdnow.com) cofounded CDnow with his brother in 1994. CDnow, the Web's fourth-most-visited site, offers its 2 million customers more than 500,000 RealAudio sound samples and more than 500,000 music-related items, which make up a vast library of reviews, news, and features.