CHALLENGES IN CREATING A SELF-ACTUALIZING COMPANY

From extensive reading and thinking about the changes that the 20 th century was bringing to business, Dee Hock set out to create an entirely new kind of organization. By de-nominalizing (“peeling the onion”) of many words such as “organization,” “money,” “value,” “information,” etc. he came to understand the underlying processes that actually defined what “banking” was about, what “organizations” were designed to do, etc. And apparently without any influence from Humanistic Psychology (Self-Actualization Psychology) or Maslow’s and McGregor’s work, he set out to create an organization that would be much more human, humane, responsive to change, adaptable, effective, etc.— what in Neuro-Semantics we call a Self-Actualization Company.

His lifelong dream was to pioneer “a new concept of organization.” And that’s exactly what he did. Yet while it began well, it did not continue well. Even before he left as CEO, the vision by which he launched VISA was not being transmitted to the new people coming into the company.

“In spite of its successes, VISA was badly flawed. So was its leader. It is painful to think and write about failure and weakness, but it is an essential part of the story. As an archetype of chaordic organizations, we never got VISA more than a third right.” (p. 274)

Now it was not that Dee Hock expected perfection. He did not. For him the question was not “whether either institute or individuals reach their ultimate potential, but whether they are constantly rising in the scale.” Yet there were problems. Power was one of them. In seeing the hunger for power in his executive team, he sadly commented: “Power may be the ultimate addiction.”

“Perhaps the greatest mistake was to completely under-estimate the degree of individual cultural change such an organization required, both in self and others. Nor did I anticipate how pervasively and persistently old concepts would reassert themselves, or the covert, tenacious resistance new methods would evoke.” (p. 276, italics added) “Consciously and unconsciously they brought their old mental baggage and installed it in the new organization. I did not realize the immense cultural change required of each person if they were to fully understand, develop, and implement the concept.” (p. 193)

VISA’s growth was explosive, so many of the newly hired people came in “full of the techniques, culture, and habits of the world from which they emerged.” They came in with the same old command-and-control practices and Hock later discovered departments where people were subjected to “intolerable rules and regulations.” And new members on the board “brought to the table all the old assumptions about management.”

“Without deep cultural change, they would naturally see my efforts to restrain their conduct as command and control. ... And I used command-and-control techniques to prevent command and

control. Plain stupid!” (277)

In times of stress, impatience led him and others to fall back on using “power” to plow through difficulties. “Each such act put the lie to what I believed and tried to persuade others to accept. All too often, I was simply unable to be the change I wanted to see.”

“On the whole, we had poor methods and techniques and far too little of them to bring about the cultural change that a chaordic organization requires, nor did we have a leader who was fully alert to the need for it.” (p. 277, italics added)

Cultural change is what was required, yet they lacked the methods and techniques to achieve that. Hock noted that in the beginning, there were no titles or even job descriptions. But then “bit by bit, the old patterns reasserted themselves until a host of ‘vices’ arose.” (278).

“It was not then apparent how difficult it was to sustain new beliefs and concepts or how long it would take for them to sink to the bone and become habitual conduct. Although VISA arose from thinking about organizations as living, biological systems, I missed completely the need for an institutional immune system to thwart the viruses of old ways.” (p. 281, italics added) “I do not believe that VISA is a model to emulate. It is no more than an archetype to study, learn from, and improve upon.” (p. 282)

“An institutional immune system to thwart the viruses of old ways.” Ah! Hindsight is so insightful! In the beginning, there were open staff meetings. Every decision of the board was fully disclosed. Every employee was free to ask any question about the decisions (p. 282). The promise of open meetings and candor was often put to the test by skeptical employees. But that also did not last. Part of the problem—the old attitudes and the lack of personal development: “I never ceased to try but failed to keep properly at bay the Four Beasts that inevitably devour their keeper: Ego, Envy, Avarice, and Ambition.” (p. 193)

That was actually just the beginning. What undermined the effectiveness of the new kind of organization, a self-actualizing company, were deficiency-needs that were out of control: “archaic notions of scarcity, ownership, and finite physical quantity” (p. 200), assumptions from the mechanized, Industrial Age of magazine crafting, managing things, etc. (201), “wealth, fame, and power become deities to worship. It is a desperately sick society that does so” (289).

“If we were to set out to design an efficient system for the methodical destruction of community, we could do no better than our present efforts to monetize all value and reduce life to the tyranny of measurement.” (p. 43)

Ah yes, he needs “an institutional immune system” against the viruses of old ways! What surprised him ought to warn us— the challenge of change that will last and be sustainable has to be “deep cultural change.” The change has to go so deep that it changes the very culture of the organization. It has to transform the values, beliefs, identities, intentions, and attitudes that are embedded in the very framework of “how we do things around here.” Nor can the change initiatives be a one-time event. It must be a continuous program that works on the deep attitudes of people. And that kind of ongoing systemic change doesn’t happen quickly, not without sustained effort, and not without intentional leadership.

Today we are much more aware of the need for deep pervasive cultural change than CEO Dee Hock was in the 1970s and 1980s. Today we know all the more about the power of old habits to

undermine going development. Today we know that we have to initiate a coaching culture (or a self-actualization culture) as an essential part of a corporate change. And today we have many of those “methods and techniques.”