The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock ANS

Here is the beginning of a seven page article.  It's very interesting, but long.  It's about a new way to organize a business.  so read this and if you want to read the rest, go here:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/05/deehock.html?page=0%2C0   
--Kim

The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock

By: M. Mitchell WaldropOctober 31, 1996
The corporate radical who organized Visa wants to dis-organize your company.

"We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born -- a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed."

Not the fire-and-brimstone gospel preaching of a tent revivalist -- but preaching nonetheless. This is the workplace gospel of Dee Ward Hock, a 67-year-old retired banker with a powerful message of change, hope, and possibility, and the promise of a shining synthesis of chaos and order, a "chaordic organization."

Peter Senge, author of "The Fifth Discipline" and a leader in organizational redesign, brought in Hock last year to help reconceive his MIT Center for Organizational Learning, a consortium of 20 companies dedicated to cutting-edge work in corporate adaptability. "Dee is one of the most original thinkers on the subject of organization that I've come across," Senge says.

Alan Wright, education director for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections, who recently started working with Hock to organize a statewide movement for educational reform, says, "I see Dee as a leader in bringing innovative ideas to this field." And at the National 4-H Council, the not-for-profit youth arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cooperative Extension Service, which started working with Hock over a year ago, Vice President Donald Floyd says, "We've done all kinds of consultants, and we've done a lot of heavy-duty facilitator stuff. But this is different."

When he talks, Dee Hock is charismatic and compelling. But people listen to him for one reason: credibility. Unlike most visionaries -- or management consultants -- Hock has put his ideas into practice. More than 25 years ago he oversaw the creation of a business that was organized according to the same principles of distributed power, diversity, and ingenuity that he advocates today. And that business has prospered -- to put it mildly.

Since 1970 it has grown by something like 10,000%. It continues to expand at roughly 20% per year. It now operates in some 200 countries worldwide. It serves roughly half a billion clients.

And this year, its annual sales volume is expected to pass $1 trillion.

This is one of Dee Hock's favorite tricks to play on an audience. "How many of you recognize this?" he asks, holding out his own Visa card.

Every hand in the room goes up.

"Now," Hock says, "how many of you can tell me who owns it, where it's headquartered, how it's governed, or where to buy shares?"

Confused silence. No one has the slightest idea, because no one has ever thought about it.

And that, says Hock, is exactly how it ought to be. "The better an organization is, the less obvious it is," he says. "In Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization and keep it that way. It's the results, not the structure or management that should be apparent." Today the Visa organization that Hock founded is not only performing brilliantly, it is also almost mythic, one of only two examples that experts regularly cite to illustrate how the dynamic principles of chaos theory can be applied to business.
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