Olivia: Alright Jackson, what do you know about the guy who founded Visa? Jackson: Let me guess. A slick, Wall Street finance bro who probably has a yacht named 'Transaction Fees'? Olivia: Not even close. Try a self-described 'bloodied sheep' and 'professional failure' who retired to a farm at the peak of his success. Jackson: Whoa, okay. That is the opposite of what I expected. A professional failure who creates one of the biggest financial companies on Earth? How does that happen? Olivia: That's the story we're diving into today from Dee Hock's incredible book, One From Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization. It’s this amazing blend of memoir, business history, and philosophy. And what's wild is that Hock, the man who built this global financial behemoth, only had a two-year college degree. Jackson: Really? So he was a total outsider. Olivia: A complete outsider. And that's probably why he could see things no one else could. He never fit the corporate mold, and frankly, he hated it.

Jackson: Okay, so if he hated the corporate world so much, how did he end up at the center of it? You called him a 'bloodied sheep'. What does that even mean? Olivia: It’s his own term for himself. For the first sixteen years of his career, he felt like he was constantly being mauled by these rigid, command-and-control companies. He was this incredibly innovative guy, but his bosses just wanted conformity. He describes this one experience that I think everyone who's ever worked in an office will recognize. It was called the "Sign Project." Jackson: The Sign Project? That sounds incredibly boring. Olivia: Oh, it was designed to be. His boss told him to put up some new signs to direct visitors to executive offices. A simple, 30-minute task. But his cynical, brilliant colleague, a guy named Dick Simmons, pulls him aside and says, "That will never do. Important projects always take time." Jackson: Oh no. I know where this is going. This is the birth of 'fake work'. Olivia: Exactly. Simmons teaches him that in these companies, "procedure is more important than purpose, and method more important than results." So for months, Simmons masterfully complicates this trivial task. He gets conflicting opinions from different executives, he has them bickering over layouts and furnishings for a new office, all to prove how absurd the system is. He just left "murky minds unrated and petty minds free to fuss." Jackson: That is both hilarious and deeply depressing. It's like a corporate horror story. He's basically weaponizing bureaucracy against itself. Olivia: He is. And Hock is watching all this, and it just deepens his disillusionment. He keeps getting fired or quitting from jobs, even when he's producing incredible results, because he refuses to conform. He's stubborn, unorthodox, and rebellious. By his mid-thirties, with a pregnant wife and two kids, he's unemployed and considers himself a total failure. Jackson: Wow. So what does he do? Olivia: He makes a radical decision. He and his wife decide he'll "retire on the job." He takes a low-level, no-title, no-guarantee position at a local bank in the Pacific Northwest. The idea was to just disengage, stop climbing the ladder, and give himself time to read, think, and be with his family. Jackson: So he basically 'quiet quit' before it was a thing. He just checked out. Olivia: He tried to. But this is the great paradox of his life. This act of stepping back, of giving up ambition, was the very thing that prepared him for his life's work. It gave him the space to develop his own philosophy of organization, completely outside the suffocating structures he'd spent his life fighting. He was no longer trying to change the company; he was changing himself. And that's when the biggest mess in banking history landed right in his lap.

Jackson: Okay, so this 'professional failure' who is actively trying to be insignificant at a bank is suddenly at the center of a crisis. What was this mess? Olivia: It was the credit card industry of the late 1960s. It was an absolute house of cards. Banks had rushed into it, driven by hype and fear of missing out. But the systems were primitive. We're talking paper imprints of cards, no central clearinghouse. Fraud was rampant. One magazine cover depicted banks as Icarus flying to the sun on wings of plastic, about to plunge into a sea of red ink labeled "losses." Jackson: So it was the Wild West. Olivia: Completely. The losses weren't in the tens of millions, as people thought. Hock's committee discovered they were in the hundreds of millions in 1960s money and accelerating. The entire system was on the verge of collapse. And this is where Hock, the outsider, gets put in charge of launching a new BankAmericard program. Jackson: The guy who hates corporations is asked to build a new one. What does he do? Olivia: He does the opposite. He persuades his conservative boss to abandon all traditional banking practices. They set up shop in the bank's auditorium, a chaotic, open space they nicknamed "The Zoo." And it's here that Hock’s core idea comes to life. He calls it a "chaordic" organization. Jackson: Hold on, 'chaordic'? Can you break that down for me? It sounds like a made-up word. Olivia: It is! He coined it himself by combining "chaos" and "order." He believed that all truly effective systems in nature, from a forest to the human brain, exist in this state—a harmonious blend of chaos and order. They are self-organizing, self-governing, and adaptive. He wanted to build an organization that worked like nature, not like a machine. Jackson: That sounds great philosophically, but how did it work when people's money was on the line? Give me an example. Olivia: The best example is the "Broom Handle Solution." They were just two weeks from their big launch, and the multi-million dollar computer system they needed to print the card mailers completely failed. The vendor said there was no fix. The project was dead. Jackson: Oh, that's a nightmare. Olivia: Total nightmare. But in the middle of the chaos, Hock’s partner, Bob Cummings, sees a janitor's push broom. He has this crazy idea. He says, "What if we use the handle as an axle?" So this team of bankers, programmers, and executives spent all night manually rolling these massive spools of paper through the printer using broom handles. Senior officers were on their hands and knees, guiding the forms. It was pure, unadulterated, collaborative chaos. And it worked. They made the deadline. Jackson: They used broom handles to save a multi-million dollar launch? That's incredible. It sounds a bit like that gaming company, Valve, where they have no bosses and people just swarm on projects. Is that a chaordic system? Olivia: It's definitely in the same spirit! It’s about enabling people, not controlling them. Hock's belief was that the core of the organization should just be a "jeweled bearing," a tiny, near-frictionless center that allows the parts to self-organize around it. His job wasn't to command, but to create the conditions for ingenuity to emerge. Jackson: So it’s about trust. Trusting that ordinary people can do extraordinary things if you just get out of their way. Olivia: Precisely. He proved it again when he had to unite the international banks. They were deadlocked in negotiations, full of pride and national rivalries. So Hock had these golden cufflinks made, inscribed with a Latin phrase: "The will to succeed, the grace to compromise." He gave them to everyone at a dinner, and the next day, they reached an agreement on every single issue. He didn't use force or logic; he used a symbol to appeal to a shared purpose. That’s the chaordic way.

Jackson: Okay, so he pulls off this miracle, creates Visa, and it becomes this massive success. He must have felt on top of the world. Olivia: You'd think so, but this is the most fascinating part of the story. In 1984, at the absolute pinnacle of Visa's success, he walked away. He severed all ties and went to live on a 200-acre ranch, convinced his work at Visa was only "preparatory." Jackson: Preparatory for what? And how can you create VISA and call it a failure? Olivia: He considered it a "successful business failure." On the surface, it was a triumph of growth and profit. But by his own standards—by what it ought to be—it fell short. His biggest regret was his failure to prevent "duality." Jackson: Duality? Olivia: He was convinced that if banks were allowed to be members of both Visa and its main competitor, MasterCharge, it would kill competition and eventually lead to a monopoly. He fought for years to prohibit it, even getting death threats for his stance. Jackson: Death threats? Over a banking bylaw? Olivia: Yes, it's chilling. He describes finding a cross slashed on the back of his office chair and a book from his personal library returned with a screw driven through it. The pressure was immense. In the end, the Department of Justice, against his judgment, allowed duality. And his prediction came true. Within six months, the industry consolidated, and true competition withered. Jackson: Wow. So he won the battle but felt he lost the war. Olivia: In a way. It led him to a deeper philosophical question. He developed this idea he called the "spectrum of cognition." It goes from noise, to data, to information, to knowledge, to understanding, and finally, to wisdom. Jackson: Okay, can you walk me through that? Olivia: Sure. Noise is just raw sensory input. It becomes data when we can recognize a pattern. Data becomes information when it's put into a coherent context. Information becomes knowledge when we can use it to act. Knowledge becomes understanding when we can judge and value it. And understanding becomes wisdom when it's informed by purpose, ethics, and a sense of the past and future. Jackson: I see. So it's a hierarchy of meaning. Olivia: Exactly. And Hock's critique of the modern world was that we are drowning in data and information, but we are starved for understanding and wisdom. He felt the Department of Justice had all the data from the banks saying they wouldn't go dual, but they lacked the wisdom to see the inevitable outcome. He felt even Visa, his own creation, was becoming a victim of its own success, prioritizing data and growth over purpose and wisdom.

Jackson: That's a heavy thought. That the very systems we build to manage information are actually preventing us from becoming wise. Olivia: It's the core of his message. So you have this man who rejects the system, then uses that rejection to build a new kind of system based on chaos and order, and finally, he walks away because he realizes that even his creation couldn't fully escape the old world's hunger for control and its obsession with data over wisdom. Jackson: So the book isn't just about Visa. Olivia: Not at all. The book is about the constant, difficult struggle to create organizations that are truly human, that are more like a forest than a factory. It's about a new model of reality. Hock believed the problem wasn't out there in our institutions; it was 'in here,' in our own minds, in our outdated, mechanistic ways of seeing the world. Jackson: He has this line about not knowing when you might step on one of the "tiny, jeweled bearings on which life can turn." That phone call that pulled him out of his 'retirement on the job' was one of those. It makes you wonder what jeweled bearings we're stepping on in our own lives without realizing it. Olivia: Exactly. And Hock's central question still hangs in the air: Why are our institutions everywhere—political, commercial, social—so broken? And what can we, as individuals, do about it? It’s a powerful thought to leave with. Jackson: It really is. He says everyone has choices to make about where they will lead and where they will be led. Olivia: And that no one is without the power to choose wisely. We'd love to hear your thoughts. What's the most 'chaordic' thing you've ever been a part of? A project, a team, a family vacation? Let us know on our socials. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.