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Dee Hock. Birth of the Chaordic Age. San Francisco: BerrettKoehler, 2000, 345 pages, $27.95.
Reviewed by Stephen Hrop, Vice President, HR Strategic Initiatives, Prudential, Newark, NJ.
In an age where the Internet is making Marshall McLuhan's "global village" a reality, new concepts of organization are the norm in the world of business book publishing. Many of these works attempt to generalize the tenets of the revolutionary scientific framework known as complexity theory to the study of organizations. Perhaps the best-known example is Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley (1992).
Birth of the Chaordic Age fits squarely in this genre from a content standpoint, but is unique in style. The author, founder and former CEO of VISA International, has written an expansive, rambling work that's a mix of spiritual autobiography (a la Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), career memoir, credit card industry history, and sales pitch (more on this last point at the end of the review).
As noted by the author, the essence of a chaordic system is selforganization and continuous adaptation via a harmonious blend of chaos and order. By conscious design, the book itself is chaordic in structure. Hock has a tendency to segue seamlessly from descriptions of mundane details about the inner workings of a credit card operation to rarefied heights of philosophical meditation, such as the following passage:
"Is man machine? Is machine man? Are both inseparably connected and related in ways we can't comprehend? Why or how did we begin to think of making machines like men and men like machines?"
Unusual reflections for a former CEO of a major corporation with a worldwide presence! Hock clearly is an outlier who by his own admission never fit the mold of a corporate executive. Given the tangible presence of the author's values and personality on every page of the book, a brief...