Autobiography of a Restless Mind: Reflections on the Human Condition Volume 2

By Dee Hock

Volume 2

Autobiography of a Restless Mind is a fascinating, exceptionally diverse collection of observations and reflections written over the past twenty-five years by one of the most innovative thinkers, writers, and leaders of the past half century. Witty and wise, playful and profound, prophetic and immensely quotable, it is a companion no thinking, caring person should be without. Written in an unforgettable style reminiscent of Aurelius, Montaigne, Lao-Tse, and Bacon, it is a classic that will be read with pleasure and profit for generations to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475978674

Dee Hock

Dee Hock, often described as a visionary and iconoclast, is founder and CEO emeritus of Visa Inc., now an $8.5 trillion global enterprise. In 1991, he became one of thirty living laureates of the US Business Hall of Fame. In 1992 he was recognized as one of eight individuals who have most changed the way people live in the past half century. He is the author of numerous articles and a previous book, One from Many; Visa and the Rise of Chaordic Organization.

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Copyright © 2013 Dee Hock

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-7868-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7869-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7867-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013903731

iUniverse rev. date: 5/22/2013

For

Steven L. Hock,

who came as a gift

December 15, 1952.

Greatly gifted, he

gave too many, too

much, too soon.

October 16, 2012,

he gave his all.

Preface

As a young child born in a tiny cottage in a small farming village in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I discovered three principal loves of my life: nature, reading, and unstructured learning. With school and church came increasing confinement, demands for conformity, and crushing boredom, along with sharp, rising awareness of the chasm between how organizations profess to function and how they actually do—between what they claim to do for people and what they actually do to them.

When I was fourteen, the fourth love of my life appeared—a beautiful, brown-eyed girl. We married at twenty. Sidetracked into business to support a growing family, I vowed to escape as soon as possible. It took thirty-five years. During the first fifteen years, I held management positions with large financial services companies. As partial recompense for dislike of business, I continued to read and study voraciously. It led to three questions that soon dominated my life. Time and time again I asked:

•   Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the organizations of which they are part?

•   Why are organizations, everywhere, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?

•   Why are society and the biosphere increasing in disarray?

Pursuit of the answers to these questions led me, at the age of thirty-nine, to an opportunity to create a new and innovative form of organization to rescue a collapsing infant bank credit card system; then lead it for fourteen years as it swiftly became the largest payment system in the world, now Visa, Inc. Today it consists of 19,000 financial institutions operating in 240 countries and territories, with 2.5 billion cardholders making 80 billion transactions totaling $8.5 trillion annually.

Those interested in the formation and growth of Visa and the iconoclastic concepts and beliefs on which it was based can find the story in my previous book, One from Many, published in 1999 by Berrett/Koehler.

During my business years, I developed the habit of formulating short, graphic assertions, often in the form of aphorisms, maxims, and metaphors to test and clarify my thinking.

In 1980, I took the first step to keep my vow to escape from business by purchasing two hundred acres of ravaged land in coastal hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean with intent to restore it to health and beauty through personal labor. A daily record of life on the land was begun to document the process.

Four years later, in 1984, I resigned as CEO of Visa, turned my back on the business world, and turned to my first loves—family, nature, books, contemplation, and the isolation of manual labor on the land. A house was eventually built there containing a poor boy’s dream realized, a library containing five thousand books accumulated over the years.

Rising at five thirty to write a thousand or more words before beginning the day’s labor became an entrenched habit, unbroken to this day. Each day’s writing ended with four or five short reflections on subjects then occupying my mind. By the late ’90s, my writing had grown to five thousand pages containing several thousand of the short reflections. It occurred to me that a selection of them in the order written would constitute a history of sorts, which I came to think of as the autobiography of a restless mind.

Unexpected events intervened, including the opportunity to write and publish One from Many. By the end of 2007, my writing had grown to ten thousand pages, including more than fifteen thousand of the short reflections and observations. I returned to the idea of publishing a selection of them.

Since the mind never works linearly by subject matter but flutters from thought to thought and idea to idea with the agility of a butterfly sipping nectar in a field of wildflowers, I selected one in five, in the order they occurred to me and were written, then indexed them by subject matter for the convenience of readers with specialized interests.

By pure coincidence, the contents of these two volumes of the Autobiography of a Restless Mind were written in the two decades spanning the turn of the millennium. Volume one contains selections from those written in the last decade of the last century of the last millennium, when I was in my sixties. Volume two contains selections from the first decade of the first century of the new millennium, when I was in my seventies.

I make no claim to have fully believed them when written, to believe them today, or to have fully lived into those I do believe. Nor do I pretend that others have not thought or written about many of the same things over the centuries, for most regard common concerns of mankind. The only claims asserted are that they then occupied my mind, seemed worth serious thought, contained some truth, or indulged my lifelong love affair with the music of words.

Neither do I apologize for the use of hyperbole, satire, metaphor, irony, or any other literary device when it serves to make a point; nor for addressing basic ideas from different perspective or different words.

And please, kind reader, do not be angry when I use one gender or the other as metaphor for the whole of the human race.

Dee W. Hock

March 1, 2013

VOLUME TWO

2001 through 2008

Introduction

The first decade of the new millennium was increasingly turbulent, as news headlines reveal.

Dotcom bubble crash—Vladimir Putin elected president of Russia—Concorde crash in France kills 113—Sydney hosts Olympic games—Wikipedia launched—George W. Bush sworn in as US president—Terrorist attack brings down World Trade Center towers killing thousands—First tourist in space—Apple launches ipad—Euro currency begins circulation—Deadliest act of terrorism in the history of Indonesia—Columbia space shuttle disaster strikes—Second invasion of Iraq begins—Human genome project completed—Record heat wave kills tens of thousands in Europe—Myspace introduced—China launches its first manned space mission—Worldwide oil production hits plateau—Twitter launched—North Korea conducts its first nuclear test—Saddam Hussein executed—Global economic recession—Shooting rampage kills 32 at Virginia Tech—Market blast in Baghdad kills 100—Prime minister Bhutto of Pakistan killed—Minneapolis bridge over Mississippi collapses—First recorded hurricane in South Atlantic—George W. Bush reelected—Olympic games in Athens—Train bombing in Madrid kills 200—First privately funded human space satellite—Facebook launched—New world’s tallest building in Asia—Indian ocean earthquake results in a quarter million deaths—Youtube launched—Suicide bombers terrorize London—Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans–Angela Merkel first female chancellor of Germany.

After selling our rural paradise in 1999, we moved to the state of Washington, where we bought a derelict house on two acres of land with saltwater frontage at the south end of Puget Sound. In February 2001, a major earthquake (6.8 on the Richter scale) with the epicenter but two miles from our house provided ample adventure. It was our second such experience, the first (6.9 magnitude) having occurred in February 1989, with the epicenter but four miles from our ranch house in California.

Sales from my recently published book, One from Many, were brisk and brought even more invitations to speak and consult, which I had little desire to pursue. After ten years of intense effort to catalyze institutional change without notable success, I had become disillusioned. As the closing lines of Voltaire’s Candide