How can anyone build a company tougher than Microsoft? A brand better known than Nike? By following Dee Hock's leadership ideas, revealed in depth for the first time in The Birth of the Chaordic Organization. Hock, one of thirty living Laureates of the Business Hall of Fame, is acknowledged as the father of the credit card. In 1970, he struck upon the organizational value of a revolutionary principle: Let chaos loose within a business and enable order only where truly needed. This chaordic theory catapulted VISA, the company he founded, from obscure beginnings to the triumphant present, when 600 million people the world over use VISA products from its 20,000 member financial institutions. A paragon of chaordic management, VISA defies the obsolete logic of conventional corporations. Where GE or GM are centralized, VISA is dispersed; where they are product and production driven, VISA is brand and system driven; where they are strictly controlled, VISA is a massive nonauthoritarian alliance not entirely unlike the Internet. VISA has been rewarded for using Hock's ideas by growing more than twenty percent every year since its founding twenty-eight years ago.
Far more than just an insider's history of VISA, The Birth of the Chaordic Organization is an intimate look at the mind and beliefs of a remarkably courageous, innovative thinker. It offers the framework by which any organization, small or large, public or private, profit or nonprofit, can understand the future and reconceive itself to achieve lasting success.
