Dee Hock is a great guy, but not a Nobel Prize winner.
It's worth reading Dee Hock's writings. He sounds like a collectivist nutcase at first. But this is the guy who designed how Visa, the organization, works. He got all the big banks to sign on. And he was a mid-level guy at a small bank when he did it.
Few people outside the banking industry understand what Visa really is, let alone how it's organized and governed. Internet people should. It's a good model for shared infrastructure, like Internet backbones.
Visa is a major corporation organized as a cooperative. Its members, and owners, are banks. Visa sets standards and runs the backbone network that transfers credit card transactions between banks. Visa doesn't issue credit cards or do financial transactions itself.
The details of how that works politically are complex. Yet it does work, and a lot better than, say, ICANN. I'm not going into how it's done; read Dee Hock's book.
Interesting quote, which reminds me, oddly, of Steve Wolfram.
In his magnum opus "A New Kind of Science", which I have glanced at in the bookstore and have not the slightest intention of reading anytime soon, Wolfram has spent a great deal of time and money working out simple rules that give rise to complex and interesting behavior.
The important point to notice in the present context as well as in Wolfram's is that while surprisingly simple rules can in some cases give rise to complex intelligent behavior, and indeed it's endlessly interesting when they do, most of them don't.
I presume Mr. Hock is well aware of this. I suggest, though, that this caveat is something for the reader to keep in mind before storing this quote among their Guiding Principles.
We're human beings, not cellular atomata. Granted the difference is slight...:-)
I remember reading Tom Peters years ago. Nordstrom's or some such company prided themselves in having a single page "Employee Manual" that said something like "In all matters, follow your own best judgement".
What Hock's quote means to me is that _if_ you have intelligent people, give them guiding principles and _leave them be_. Do not Mickey Mouse them with complicated rules. If you do, you will just be setting you, them, and your enterprise up for failure.
"Be there. Aloha."
-- Steve McGarret, _Hawaii Five-Oh_
Dee Hock (Score:5, Informative)
It's worth reading Dee Hock's writings. He sounds like a collectivist nutcase at first. But this is the guy who designed how Visa, the organization, works. He got all the big banks to sign on. And he was a mid-level guy at a small bank when he did it.
Few people outside the banking industry understand what Visa really is, let alone how it's organized and governed. Internet people should. It's a good model for shared infrastructure, like Internet backbones.
Visa is a major corporation organized as a cooperative. Its members, and owners, are banks. Visa sets standards and runs the backbone network that transfers credit card transactions between banks. Visa doesn't issue credit cards or do financial transactions itself.
The details of how that works politically are complex. Yet it does work, and a lot better than, say, ICANN. I'm not going into how it's done; read Dee Hock's book.
Re:Dee Hock (Score:2)
Re:Dee Hock (Score:2)
In his magnum opus "A New Kind of Science", which I have glanced at in the bookstore and have not the slightest intention of reading anytime soon, Wolfram has spent a great deal of time and money working out simple rules that give rise to complex and interesting behavior.
The important point to notice in the present context as well as in Wolfram's is that while surprisingly simple rules can in some cases give rise to complex intelligent behavior, and indeed it's endlessly interesting when they do, most of them don't.
I presume Mr. Hock is well aware of this. I suggest, though, that this caveat is something for the reader to keep in mind before storing this quote among their Guiding Principles.
The difference is... (Score:2)
I remember reading Tom Peters years ago. Nordstrom's or some such company prided themselves in having a single page "Employee Manual" that said something like "In all matters, follow your own best judgement".
What Hock's quote means to me is that _if_ you have intelligent people, give them guiding principles and _leave them be_. Do not Mickey Mouse them with complicated rules. If you do, you will just be setting you, them, and your enterprise up for failure.