One From Many

When you flip through the pages of my copy of One From Many—VISA and the Rise of the Chaordic Organization by Dee Hock you will find the following highlighted with a marker.

• Harbouring four beasts that inevitably devour their keepers:
  • trading ego for humility;
  • trading envy for equanimity;
  • trading avarice for time;
  • trading ambition for liberty.

Old Monkey Mind

• Three demanding questions appear repetitively throughout the book:
  • Why are organizations, everywhere, political, commercial, and social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?
  • Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alieniated from organizations of which they are part?
  • Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?

• Definition of chaordic:

chaordic \ kay'ord-ick \ adj. [fr. E. cha'os and ord'er] 1. The behaviour of any self-organizong and self-governing organism, organization, or system that hamoniously blends characteristics of chaos and order. 2. Characteristic of the fundamental, organizing principle of nature.

A Lamb and the Lion of Life

• The essence of community:
  • Its very heart and soul is the nonmonetary exchange of value.
  • The things we do and the things we share because we care for others, and for the good of the place.
  • Community is composed of the things that we cannot measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense.
  • Since they can't be measured, they can't be denominated in dollars, or barrels of oil, or bushels of corn—such things as respect, tolerance, love, trust, generosity, and care, the supply of which is unbounded and unlimited.
  • Without any one of the three—nonmaterial values, nonmonetary exchange of value, and proximity—no community ever existed or ever will.
  • Only fools worship their tools [like money, markets and measurements].

• What gets measured is what gets done
  • When we monetize value, we have a means of measurement, however misleading, that allows us to calculate the relative efficiency of each part of the system.
  • It doesn't occur to us that we are destroying and extremely effective system whose values we can't calculate in order to calculate the efficiency of an ineffective system.
  • What gets measured is what gets done. Perhaps that's precisely the problem.
  • In nature, when a closed cycle of receiving and giving is out of balance, death and destruction soon arise. It is the same in society.
  • Life is a gift which comes bearing a gift which is the art of giving.

• Eager to learn, but averse to being thaught.

The Bloodied Sheep

• No time to waste
  • How much time, energy, and ingenuity did they [employees] spend obeying senseless rules and procedures that had little to do with teh results they were expected to achieve?
  • How much did they devote to circumventing those rules and procedures in order to do something productive with the remainder?
  • How much was wasted interpreting those rules and enforcing them on others?
  • How much time and talent did they simply withhold due to frustration and futility?
  • It's a rare person who arrives at a sum less than 50 percent. Eighty is not uncommon.
  • In industrial age organizations, purpose slowly erodes into process.
  • Procedure takes precendence over product.
  • The doing of the doing is whay nothing gets done.

Retirement on the Job

• Leader and follower
  • Lead is word used to describe so many different forms of behaviour that it has become relatively meaningless. A favored definition of the author [Dee Hock], attributed to a centuries-old Scottish dictionary, is as follows:

leader \ 'le-der \ Lead \'led\ to go before and show the way.

• • Leader presumes follower.
  • Follower presumes choice.
  • One who is coerced to the purposes, objectives, or preferences of another is not a follower in any true sense of the word, but an object of manipulation.
  • Nor is the relationship materially altered if both parties accept the dominance and coercion.
  • The terms leader and follower imply the continual freedom and independent judgement of both.
  • A true leader cannot be bound to lead.
  • A true follower cannot be bound to follow.
  • The moment they are bound, they are no longer leader or follower.
  • If the the behaviour of either is compelled, whether by force, economic necessity, or contractual arrangement, the relationship is altered to one of superior/subordinate, manager/employee, master/servant, or owner/slave.
  • All such relationships are materially different than leader/follower.
  • Educed behavior is the essence of leader/follower.
  • Compelled behavior is the essence of the others.
  • Where behavior is compelled, there lies tyranny, however petty.
  • Where behaviour is educed, there lies leadership, however powerful.

educe \eh-duse\ A marvelous word seldom used or practiced, meaning "to bring or draw forward something already present in a latent, or undeveloped form." It can be contrasted with induce, too often used and practiced, meaning "to prevail upon; move by persuasion or influence—to impel, incite, or urge."

• • Read more on The Art of Chaordic Leadership by Dee Hock. In essence, leadership is about following responsibilities:
    1. 50% of your time spent on self-management
    2. 25% of your time spent on managing superiors
    3. 20% of your time spent on managing peers
    4. rest of your time spent on managing subordinates

• Enter the state of flow:
  • Teams whose performance transcends the ability of individuals.
  • This phenomenon can be be observed in sports, symphony, theater, in fact, every group endeavor, including business and government.
  • It is easily observed, universally admired, and occasionally experienced.
  • It happensm but cannot be deliberately done.
  • It is rarely long sustained but can be repeated.
  • It arises spontaneously from the relationships, interactions, and convictions of those from whom it is composed.
  • To be precise, one cannot speak of leaders who cause organizations to achieve superlative performance, for no one can cause it to happen.
  • Leaders can only recognize and modify conditions that prevent it; perceive and articulate a sense of community, a vision of the future, a body of principle to which people are passionately committed, then encourage and enable them to discover and bring forth the extraordinary capabilities that lie trapped in everyone, struggling to get out.
  • Without question, the most abundant, least expesive, most underutilized, and constantly abused resource in the world is human ingenuity.
  • The source of that abuse is mechanistics, industrial age, dominator organizations and the management practices they spawn.
  • In the deepest sense, the distinction between leaders and followers is meaningless.
  • In every moment of live, we are simultaneously leading and following.
  • Everyone is a born leader.
  • It is true leadership; leadership by everyone; leaderhip in, up, around, and down this world so badly needs, and dominator management so sadly gets.

The Zoo

• Governance and deeply held principles and purpose
  • In the constructive sense of the word, governance can be based only on clarity of shared intent and trust in expected behavior, heavily seasoned with common sense, tolerance, and caring for others as fellow human beings.
  • This is not to say that contracts, laws, and regulations do not serve a purpose.
  • Rather it is to point out that they can never achieve the mechanistic certainty and control we crave.
  • Rules and regulations, laws and contracts can never replace clarity of shared purpose and clear, deeply held principles about conduct in pursuit of that purpose.
  • People everywhere are growing desperate for renewed sense of community.
  • Deeply held, commonly shared purpose and principles leading to new concepts of self-organization and governance at multiple scales from the individual to the global have become essential.

• Money and Computers
  • What is the meaning of the marriage of money and computers?
  • It's not about banks or merchants or credit or cardholders.
  • It's not about data or information or computers.
  • It's about connections!
  • No, no, it's got to be deeper than that.
  • It's about massive change in interconnectivity.
  • No, no, it's got to be deeper than that.
  • It's about all things inseparably interrelated.
  • Is there some analogy between the industrial machine age as an extension of muscle, and the computer age as an extension of mind and memory?