Dee Hock Quotes

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior. —Dee Hock

The essence of community, its heart and soul, is the non-monetary exchange of value; things we do and share because we care for others, and for the good of the place.

Community is composed of that which we don't attempt to measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. Most are things we cannot measure no matter how hard we try.

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral.

We believe that a man does not have to be devoted to the winning side for his loyalty to be celebrated with reverence.

Make a careful list of all things done to you that you abhorred. Don't do them to others, ever. Make another list of things done for you that you loved. Do them for others, always.

Even the false accusations of a person of dubious morality can taint the reputation of an upright servant.

We never fully understand what we have been told until we experience it. Learning not embedded in experience is forever crippled. Unfortunately, our present society is schooled, not educated.

Much of that which passes for conversation these days is the lobbing of small bombs of dogma and little clots of banality at one another.

One of the more curious facts about human beings is that they can spend a day of introspection without discovering what is obvious to anyone who has spent a half hour in their company.

One of the more fascinating things about human behavior is the degree to which we conceive of countless boundaries that constrain and inhibit us in extraordinary ways, even though they are nothing but mental constructs that, in reality, do not exist.

Far better than a precise plan is a clear sense of direction and compelling beliefs. And that lies within you. The question is, how do you evoke it?

The greatest achievement in life is to become your own best self. Nothing external can help with that.

Just as bad money drives out good, the broad, deep, inclusive renaissance mind is being driven out by the narrow, specialized, technical mind.

If we examine with clear eyes what we have done to the majority of people on earth, to the earth itself, and to all other forms of life thereon, we can only hope that there are no gods, or if there are, that they are not just.

The ultimate insanity is to so organize society that power, wealth, and information are concentrated in the hands of so few people that they have the power, for whatever reason, to put to death our species and the living earth as well. But so we have.

Knowledge is never in doubt. Wisdom is never certain.

Children are easily taught, for they readily accept and believe lies told by their elders.

The most common lesson of history is that the butchery of one mass of people by another is, in the minds of the butchers, sanctioned by their god.

Great thought, great achievement, and great love have this in common: all involve great risk.

Nothing can be more violent and merciless than a group of true believers, no matter what they choose to believe.

Certainty is the place where questions go to die.

Do not get angry, stubborn, and imperious. Get curious.

One should not read like a dog obeying its master, but like an eagle hunting its prey.

Education that gives priority to measurement rather than values, to efficiency rather than conscience, to information rather than ethics, provides no barrier to barbarity and violence. The Holocaust was perpetrated by a society of the most disciplined, highly educated people on earth.

Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

Intent is in the composer, interpretation is in the conductor, rendering is in the instrumentalist, perception is in the listener, sound is in the notes, and rhythm is in the intervals. Music is the harmonious relationship between them all. Relationship is beauty.

There is nothing that dictates behavior more than what we want others to think of us. When that happens, we become a reflection in our own mind of what we believe is reflected in the mind of another, neither of which has the slightest chance of being correct. Talk about dogs chasing tails.

Accomplishment is one part commitment, one part ability, one part persistence, and one part circumstance. Circumstance we cannot control. The rest we might.

The ultimate profanity is to invoke any deity in support of death or destruction in any form, particularly war.

Of this we can be certain: at no time, in no place, and in no way is anything in the universe separate, independent, or unrelated.

Mix a quart of uncertainty, a quart of complexity, a quart of mystery, and a quart of adventure and you have a gallon of life.

Gratitude is an emotion linked to the past. Love and contentment are linked to the moment. Avarice, ambition, and fear are linked to the future.

If we pay great attention to the meaning of each moment of our unique life, the meaning of life in general will attend to itself.

Don’t preach. Don’t teach. Don’t judge. Take a loved child by the hand and explore something fascinating together.

We enter into each moment holding hands with a future composed of infinite possibilities and a past composed of infinite realities.

Ideas are so transcendent and alive compared to language that thousands of variations of each may be written without fully capturing any.

If Satan were twins, one the Republican nominee for president, the other the nominee of the Democrats, and God ran as an independent, can there be any doubt who would come in last?

What is a question but a moment of discontent in pursuit of understanding? What is an answer but a moment of illusion in our flight from ignorance?

Nature is infinite innovation and beauty that never repeats itself. Only man-made artifacts are endlessly repetitious, which is a principal reason our lives are so boring, full of anxiety and devoid of meaning.

Religion claims we must obey the mandates of God and clergy can tell us what they are. Science claims we must obey the laws of nature and scientists can tell us what they are. Both claims are absurdly pretentious.

Only an unimaginative man would think that mechanistic, command-and-control organizations could ever produce an equitable, enduring, free society. Only a thoughtless man would create them. Only an arrogant man would run them. Only a cruel man would perpetuate them.

With every inhalation, I take. With every exhalation, I give. How grand it is not to buy, sell, hold, or hoard breath. Would that it were so with money. Enjoy breathing while you can, for unless something changes, it won’t be long until government awards ownership of the atmosphere to some commercial corporation to price and meter out as they please.

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. Dee Hock, The Birth of the Chaordic Age The

Likewise, when the credit card took off in California in the 1960s, driven by Joseph Williams of Bank of America, there was nothing new about buying on credit. It was as old as Babylon. There was not even anything new about charge cards. Diner’s Club had been issuing cards for the convenience of restaurant users since the early 1950s and department stores for longer than that. What the BankAmericard achieved, especially once it emerged as Visa from the chaos of the mass mailings in the late 1960s, under Dee Hock’s reinvention, was the democratisation of credit. The electronic possibility that your card could be authorised for a purchase anywhere in the country or even the world was a powerful lubricant to specialisation and exchange in the economy of the late twentieth century, allowing consumers to express their choice to borrow against future earnings when it made sense. There was, of course, irresponsibility, but the credit card did not lead, as most intellectual grandees had feared,

Dee Hock says, “A book is far more than what the author wrote; it is everything you can imagine and read into it as well.

Life is not about control. It’s not about getting. It’s not about having. It’s not about knowing. It’s not even about being. Life is eternal, perpetual becoming, or it is nothing. Becoming is not a thing to be known, commanded, or controlled. It is a magnificent, mysterious odyssey to be experienced.

What we call originality is no more than ignorance of antecedents.

No one can teach us the joy of living; we are endowed with it. So why are we continually waiting for the lecture?

Reality cannot be captured by language—not even the language of mathematics—since all language, by its very nature, is man-made, self-referent ambiguity.

The wise make great use of adversity. The foolish whine about it.

Originality and creativity do not result from calculated effort, but from the natural state of consciousness—an open mind at play.

In my view the greatest evil in the world today is ever-increasing power and wealth in ever-fewer hands,” says Visa founder Dee Hock.

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

Life is so uncertain that it is far better and more joyous to play your way through it than to plan or pray your way through it.

The relational aspect of all things is the music that sets life and the universe dancing.

There is nothing at which government is more adept or diligent than relieving people of their money.

Adam was the first man, Eve the first woman, Satan the first consultant, and God the first entrepreneur.

For every difficult destination, there are thousands who stand aside and point the way for each one with courage and capacity to go before and show the way. The former are managers; the latter are leaders.

The disgruntled are abundant among those who are idle, and to be idle is a matter of choice.

Right is not this or that doctrine or opinion; right is rational discussion about shared experience between honorable people leading to mutual understanding and tolerance.

If a plethora of learning with a paucity of teaching is an approach to heaven and a plethora of teaching with a paucity of learning an approach to hell, the devil is hard at work in our educational systems.

Great achievements would be few and far between without gross overestimation of the advantages and pleasures to be expected from them.

Who takes a step bereft of love walks to death in shrouds of calculation to lie forever embalmed by money in a mausoleum of things.

Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.—Dee Hock

Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.’ – Dee Hock

Dee Hock. Chapter: Leadership and the Chaordic Age. Competition and Cooperation are not opposites. They amplify each other when held in the proper balance. 314. At bottom we have an institutional and leadership problem. 318. But this I do know with certainty: It's far too late, and things are far too bad for pessimism. We might as well get a smile on our face and get on with it. If we caused the problem, we can cause the solution—if we have the will and the courage and we care enough. In times like these, it's no failure to fall short of realizing all that we might dream. The failure is to fall short of dreaming all that we might realize. 319

Remember, in life, we don’t grow things. We have to let things grow. There’s just no getting around it. Growth and uncertainty come as a package deal. That’s okay, though. More than okay. Uncertainty is never randomness, if we know how to use it. Uncertainty is potential energy like heat from the sun. Uncertainty is what makes the whole system work—we don’t know what new branching will happen and which branches will grow and which will wither and which will connect with other branches. Jimmy Wales and Dee Hock used uncertainty to make rainforests, so to speak, and that’s what all Constellation leaders do. They create the ecosystem for the use and reuse of energy at any scale.

Dee Hock had the word educe; Jacobs had ramify. It’s the root of ramification, as in consequences. But ramify alone means to branch or differentiate. It is an active verb. She felt that the branching is where energy finds new opportunity—branching out a new brand or product line, branching into a new location. It’s these small, repetitive evolutions that make a profound impact over time. The more dynamic the environment—the more people you have with this mindset—the more energy will be created. And energy, which is just power repeatedly given away and returned, is the coin of the realm.

We can never escape the tension between emotion and reason; neither should we wish to, for life is meaningless without it.

The universe is full of wonderful answers patiently waiting for us

It is impossible to conceive of idea apart from life. Every living thing has an idea of life, and every idea must have a living thing in which to arise.

It is common to learn from experience what we already believe, then repeat the experience to prove what we believe we learned. The process was invented by religion and perfected by science.

The greatest writers have no purpose but to incite in the minds of each reader the highest and best thought of which they are capable.

Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior. —Dee Hock