Dee Hock Quotes
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Failure is not to be feared. It is from failure that most growth comes.
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The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income.
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People are not "things" to be manipulated, labeled, boxed, bought, and sold. Above all else, they are not "human resources." They are entire human beings, containing the whole of the evolving universe, limitless until we start limiting them. We must examine the concept of leading and following with new eyes. We must examine the concept of superior and subordinate with increasing skepticism. We must examine the concept of management and labor with new beliefs. And we must examine the nature of organizations that demand such distinctions with an entirely different consciousness.
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Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.
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If you think you can't, why think
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Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.
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If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself - your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers.
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Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.
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It is not making better people of others that management is about. It's about making a better person of self. Income, power, and titles have nothing to do with that.
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Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength and idiotic to replicate your weakness. It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.
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We are at that very point in time when a 400-year old age is rattling in its death bed and another is struggling to be born.
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Control is not leadership; management is not leadership; leadership is leadership is leadership. If you seek to lead, invest at least 50% of your time leading yourself-your own purpose, ethics, principles, motivation, conduct. Invest at least 20% leading those with authority over you and 15% leading your peers. If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny.
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Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple stupid behavior.
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Particularity and separability are infirmities of the mind, not characteristics of the universe.
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All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea - the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgements, acts and efforts.
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Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.
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Community is composed of that which we don't attempt to measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. Most are things we cannot measure no matter how hard we try.
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Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
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The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
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Leadership: Here is the heart and soul of the matter. If you look to lead, invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers. Use the remainder to induce those you 'work for' to understand and practice...lead yourself, lead your supervisors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.
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You learn nothing form your successes except to think too much of yourself. It is from failure that all growth comes, provided you can recognize it, admit it, learn from it, rise above it, and then try again.
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If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information.
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To put it another way, I believe that purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.
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The essence of community, its heart and soul, is the non-monetary exchange of value; things we do and share because we care for others, and for the good of the place.
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The reason is still difficult to explain, but it is not complicated. That inner voice that will not be denied, once we learn to listen to it, had whispered since the beginning, "Business is not what your life is about. Founding VISA and being its chief executive officer is something you must do, but it's only preparatory."
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An organization, no matter how well designed, is only as good as the people who live and work in it.
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Only fools worship their tools
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Heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgatory is paper and procedure. Hell is rules and regulations.
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An organization's success has more to do with clarity of shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability or management competence, important as they may be.
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We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born - a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.
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