Birth of the Chaordic Age: Dee Hock CEO Visa Business Executive Book Review

This is a book that is fascinating and frustrating by turns. It's about one of the most fascinating and effective and least written-about business executives in the world, Dee Hock.

Hock is the founder and CEO Emeritus of Visa. Visa is an organizational form unlike anything anyone had ever seen or, for that matter, has seen since. It combined the efforts of organizations that were normally at each other's competitive throats. But that's not all.

In the process of getting Visa to work, Hock and the other folks that he worked with, also managed to create the payment system that is Visa. To realize how big an achievement this is, consider the fact that the check-clearing system in the Federal Reserve still does not work with a fraction of the efficiency of the Visa-approval and payment-clearing process.

I'd known about Dee Hock for years, and I was fascinated by him and by the process that must have gone into establishing, actually inventing, Visa. I snatched up this book when it came out hoping that it would contain the story of Hock and the Visa adventure. It did. That story is compelling and well written.

But there's more to this book than that story, and the "more" includes lots of bits of value and many bits of frustration.

Take the title. Birth of the what Age? "Chaordic." Try looking that up in the dictionary. It's not there. Do we need a brand-new word to describe what Hock is describing? Maybe, but I'm not sure.

I'm quite sure I don't need some of the other strange things that he does with language in the book. There is, for example, "Thee Ancient One." That turns out to be a tractor. Then there's "old monkey mind."

Old monkey mind is the term that Hock uses in several different ways throughout the book. Sometimes it's used to refer to logical, linear, left side of the brain. Sometimes it's used to refer to old thinking patterns. Sometimes it seems to be a kind of alter ego for Hock with whom he had conversations.

That kind of language is cute but it's more appropriate to a book of whimsy. Here it gets in the way of understanding. And there's a lot here to understand.