Dee Hock

Dee Ward Hock (born 1929) is the founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association. In 1968, Hock convinced Bank of America to give up ownership and control of their BankAmericard credit card program. The new company, called National BankAmerica, was a non-stock membership corporation equally owned by its member banks. The name was changed to VISA in 1976.

In May 1984, Hock resigned his management role with Visa, retiring to spend almost 10 years in relative isolation working a 200-acre (0.81 km²) parcel of land to the west of Silicon Valley. He was inducted into Junior Achievement's U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1991, and the Money magazine hall of fame in 1992.

In his 1991 Business Hall of Fame acceptance speech Hock explained: "Through the years, I have greatly feared and sought to keep at bay the four beasts that inevitably devour their keeper -- Ego, Envy, Avarice, and Ambition. In 1984, I severed all connections with business for a life of isolation and anonymity, convinced I was making a great bargain by trading money for time, position for liberty, and ego for contentment -- that the beasts were securely caged."

On March 13, 1993, Hock gave a dinner speech at the Santa Fe Institute where based on his experiences founding and operating Visa International he described systems that are both chaotic and ordered, and used for the first time the term chaordic, a portmanteau combining the words chaotic and ordered.

In February 1994, Hock accepted a grant from the Joyce Foundation for his travel expenses to study the possibilities of implementing chaordic organizations for a year and to report back.^[1]

As a result the non-profit Alliance for Community Liberty was formed in 1994 by Hock to develop, disseminate and implement these new concepts of organization, and was renamed The Chaordic Alliance in 1996.

In spring 2001 The Chaordic Commons - a 501c3 nonprofit organization - was formed to supersede the Chaordic Alliance.^[2]

Chaordic Commons

The purpose of the Chaordic Commons is to develop, disseminate, and implement new concepts of organization that result in more equitable sharing of power and wealth, improved health, and greater compatibility with the human spirit and biosphere.

Impact on Organization Development

In addition to his career in the financial industry, Hock has been active in developing new models of social and business organization. He has been particularly interested in forms of organization that are neither rigidly controlled nor anarchic, a hybrid form of consensus decision-making he terms chaordic.

Hock has authored a book on the subject, Birth of the Chaordic Age (1999) with an edition named One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization (2005) which includes two new chapters.

Quotes

• Purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.
  • quoted by Alan Hirsch in The Forgotten Ways

References

1. ^ "The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock". Fast Company magazine. 1996-10-01. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/05/deehock.html?page=0%2C5. Retrieved 2008-04-30. 
2. ^ "A Brief History of The Chaordic Alliance from 1993 to 2001 and Chaordic Commons from 2001". Chaordic Commons. 2005-12-01. http://www.chaordic.org/history.html. Retrieved 2008-04-30. 

External links

• excerpt from his book
• expanded treatment
• interview
• Plazm interview

Persondata
Name	Hock, Dee
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Date of birth	1929
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