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Birth of the Chaordic Age

Amazon.com Price:  $6.26 (as of 12/05/2019 20:10 PST- Details)

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Description

In Birth of the Chaordic Age, Dee Hock argues that traditional organizational forms can no longer work because organizations have turn into too complex. Hock advocates a new organizational form that he calls “”chaordic, “” or concurrently chaotic and orderly. He credits the worldwide success of VISA with its chaordic structure — it is owned by its member banks which both compete with each other for customers and will have to cooperate by honoring one another’s transactions across borders and currencies. The book shows how these same chaordic concepts are now being put into practice in a broad range of business, social, community, and government organizations.

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-regulate institutions and sees organizations that are falling apart, failing to achieve their own purposes let alone addressing the diversity and complexity of society as a whole. The solution, Hock claims, lies in transforming our notion of organization; in embracing the belief that the chaos of competition and the order of cooperation can and do coexist, succeed, even thrive; and in welcoming in the chaordic age.

The underlying tenets of Hock’s ideas are well illustrated by the unbelievable story of the birth of VISA International, an organization 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 right through 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 in conjunction with the creator, its New Age spiritual tone is occasionally a bit saccharine. His insights, then again, are clear and provocative. 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 regulate of people and more on internal discipline.” Hear, hear. –S. Ketchum

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