Revised edition of Hock's award-winning Birth of the Chaordic Age, updated throughout and featuring two new chapters
• The only first-person account of the rise of VISA, the world's largest business enterprise--in 2004, VISA’s products were used by more than a billion people at 20 million locations in more than 150 countries
• Hock, VISA’s founder, details the revolutionary "chaordic" organizational philosophy that was instrumental in VISA’s success
Hock skillfully weaves together the story of VISA with his own remarkable life story and elaborates the visionary philosophy that allowed VISA to thrive. Hock calls his approach "chaordic"--simultaneously chaotic and orderly. Hock makes a compelling argument that this organizational philosophy is a more supple, responsive and creative alternative to mechanistic Industrial Age models, one more in tune with what we see in nature.
One from Many--revised throughout from its original hardcover publication as The Birth of the Chaordic Age--includes two new chapters in which Hock reflects on his post-VISA experiences as an advocate for chaordic principles, and details some examples of chaordic principles in action: the Internet, World Weather Watch, Alcoholics Anonymous, and others. Lyrical, playful, philosophical, and straight from the heart, One From Many challenges us to change forever the way we think about money, organizations, leadership, management, the human spirit, and our relationship to the natural world.
Revised edition of Hock's award-winning Birth of the Chaordic Age, updated throughout and featuring two new chapters
• The only first-person account of the rise of VISA, the world's largest business enterprise--in 2004, VISA’s products were used by more than a billion people at 20 million locations in more than 150 countries
• Hock, VISA’s founder, details the revolutionary "chaordic" organizational philosophy that was instrumental in VISA’s success
Hock skillfully weaves together the story of VISA with his own remarkable life story and elaborates the visionary philosophy that allowed VISA to thrive. Hock calls his approach "chaordic"--simultaneously chaotic and orderly. Hock makes a compelling argument that this organizational philosophy is a more supple, responsive and creative alternative to mechanistic Industrial Age models, one more in tune with what we see in nature.
One from Many--revised throughout from its original hardcover publication as The Birth of the Chaordic Age--includes two new chapters in which Hock reflects on his post-VISA experiences as an advocate for chaordic principles, and details some examples of chaordic principles in action: the Internet, World Weather Watch, Alcoholics Anonymous, and others. Lyrical, playful, philosophical, and straight from the heart, One From Many challenges us to change forever the way we think about money, organizations, leadership, management, the human spirit, and our relationship to the natural world.
About the Author
Dee Hock (Author)
Dee Hock is founder and CEO emeritus of VISA. In 1991, Hock became one of thirty living Laureates of the Business Hall of Fame, and in 1992 was recognized by Money magazine as one of the eight individuals who most changed the way people live in the previous quarter century.
Excerpt
One From Many
Introduction
Today, before any audience in the world, I can hold a Visa card overhead and ask,“How many of you recognize this?” Every hand in the room will go up.When I ask,“How many of you can tell me who owns it, how it’s governed, or where to buy shares?” a dead silence comes over the room. Something incredible happened, but what, and how?
In 1969, Visa was little more than a set of unorthodox convictions about organization slowly growing in the mind of a young corporate rebel. In 2004, its products are created by 21,000 owner/member financial institutions and used by more than a billion people to purchase $3.2 trillion of goods and services at 20 million merchant locations in more than 150 countries, the largest block of consumer purchasing power in the global economy. For thirty-five years, it has grown from 15 to 50 percent, compounded annually, with no end in sight.
But this book is much more than the story of the scarcely believable events that brought Visa into being and led to its extraordinary success. It is also the story of an introverted, smalltown child, passionate to read, dream, and wander the woods, the youngest of six, born to parents with but an eighth-grade education. It’s a story of crushing confinement and interminable boredom in school and church, along with sharp, rising awareness of the chasm between how institutions profess to function and how they actually do; what they claim to do for people and what they actually do to them. It’s about three compelling questions arising from that awareness:
Why are institutions, everywhere, whether political, commercial, or social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?
Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the institutions of which they are part?
Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?
It’s a story of a lifelong search for the answer to those questions, which had everything to do with the formation of Visa. It’s a story of harboring four beasts that inevitably devour their keeper; ego, envy, avarice, and ambition; and of a great bargain, trading ego for humility, envy for equanimity, avarice for time, and ambition for liberty. It’s a story of events impossible to foresee, that sent a man of seventy on a journey more improbable than Visa, and infinitely more important.
Beyond all else, it’s a story of the future; of something trying to happen; of a four-hundred year old age rattling in its deathbed as another struggles to be born. It is not just my story, although I am in it. It is not just your story, although you are in it. It is a story of us all.