Dee Hock was in 1973
the founder and has been CEO Emeritus of VISA, a non-profit, private
partnership, whose partners are most of the commercial banks in the
world.With revenue
of $2 trillion per year VISA has been the world's largest business.The VISA concept was an innovation not based on technology,
although it adopted state-of-the-art information technology for its
purposes as it evolved.Hock's
"chaordic organizations" have an important similarity to the
"Solutions" programs.A guiding principle, invoked over and over again to organize VISA
and get it operational and upwardly scalable as new bank partners
joined, was this: the VISA charter, by-laws, and operations had to be made scalable
so as to permit the entrance of new partners with the full status of
initiating partners.Furthermore, all partnership decisions had to be based on what a
consensus believed ought to be not on what was widely expected
to be.
VISA benefits the bank partners far more
than the majority of users, the customers and merchants who participate
in VISA and outnumber the bankpartners
by at least a thousand to one.In his best-seller "Birth of the Chaordic Age", based
on the VISA experience, Hock explains that the bank owners of VISA
refused when he tried to get them to agree to keep the partnership open
for customers and merchants to join that would have meant that anyone
with a VISA card or merchant who accepted VISA payments would get a
share of VISA surplus or "profits". VISA
failed to meet the first criteria of Solutions. VISA
became a commercial success, not the magnificent social innovation Hock
aspired to.
