Product Description

Written by the founder, president, and CEO emeritus of VISA International, this is the story of how VISA International was conceived, founded and established. It is also the life story of Dee Hock, a maverick banker who put his own wild ideas into practice to create something the likes of which the world had never seen. This text challenges the ideas and radical philosophy about the nature of the world, the role of money and organizations in the world, reinventing leadership and management, and transforming business and society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #471229 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 345 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Birth of the Chaordic Age is a compelling manifesto for the future, embedded within the intriguing story of a personal odyssey. An engaging narrator, Dee Hock is the man who first conceived of a global system for the electronic exchange of value, becoming the founder and CEO of VISA International. He looks critically at today's environment of command-and-control institutions and sees organisations that are falling apart, failing to achieve their own purpose let alone address the diversity and complexity of society as a whole. The solution, Hock claims, lies in transforming our notion of organisation, of embracing the belief that the chaos of competition and the order of cooperation can and does coexist, succeed, even thrive, and of welcoming in the chaordic age.

The underlying tenets of Hock's ideas are well illustrated by the incredible story of the birth of VISA International, an organisation formed on chaordic principles that now links in excess of 20,000 financial institutions, 14 million merchants and 600 million consumers in 220 countries. Hock deplores an age where ingenuity and effort are wasted on circumventing the rules and regulations of insular, hierarchical bureaucracies. In a bold-type subtext interspersed throughout the book, he examines how this situation is stunting our potential as individuals and communities and contemplates what can be changed. This rumination is propelled onward by "Old Monkey Mind" (Hock's own thoughts). Though the technique allows the reader to engage in stimulating mental discovery along with the author, its New Age spiritual tone is sometimes a bit saccharine. His insights, however, are clear and provoking. In the Chaordic Age, he contends, "success will depend less on rote and more on reason; less on the authority of the few and more on the judgment of many; less on compulsion and more on motivation; less on external control of people and more on internal discipline". Hear, hear. --S. Ketchum

Customer Reviews

The Right Stuff for Maximum Human Progress
If you are interested in the best way for people to work together in organizations, you must read Dee Hock's account of the founding and development of Visa. His thinking has played a key role for those who are trying to apply chaos and complexity theory to organizations, and to seminal thinkers like Peter Senge and Arie de Geus.

Now, you can read the simple, humble thoughts that can turn ordinary people into extraordinary combinations of effectiveness. I loved the aphorisms interspaced through the book and the down-to-earth way that Dee Hock shared his experiences and thoughts.

Think of this as the opposite of Chainsaw Al, and with greater results.

Anyone who wants to move beyond the command and control culture that tends to dominate in most organizations should read Dee Hock's account of Chaordic Organizations in the new Chaordic Age.

If you liked The Fifth Discipline, The Dance of Change, The Soul at Work or The Living Company, this is must reading for you.

An affirmation of a paradigm shift in philosophical thinging
Nelson Mandela's statue on the South Bank has a quote form him as follows - "The Struggle Is My Life".

Dee Hock lived a fulfilling life of struggle in engaging co-operation from numerous disparate banking organisations to form an organisation that does not exist in the usual sense. Visa is a Chaordic organisation. It is based on a fundamental philosophical understanding of the mathematical science of Chaos Theory or as Waldrup calls it Complexity.

A huge proportion of us go off to work or are serviced by bureaucractic organisations which are hierarchical downward coercive power driven historical anomolies.

What does this millenia hold for use - bureaucratic anarchy or as Dee Hock describes the Chaordic organisation.

There are two levels:
There is the fascinating business operatic tale of the development of VISA.
Then there is Old Monkey Mind - putting VISA and Dee's perspective into a world changing, developing and equitably harmonious possibility

Will Birth of the Chaordic Age become real in our life time. With the fluttering of many individual 'butterflies wings' of chaos theory experiEncing Nelson Mandella's 'the struggle is my life' it could be.

It could be if you read the book and live your version of the Chaordic Age.