Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
by Yvon Chouinard
One From Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization by Dee Hock
I have always felt like an odd duck in most traditional business environments. Either I’m too granola for the for-profits, or too intense for the non-profits. To many people, the values of non-profit and for-profit enterprises seem exclusive, so I am always eager to learn about successful businesses that combine public benefit with wealth creation to add to the list of models to emulate. Between the works of Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia and Dee Hock, founder of VISA, I think I found the space where the “hippie” and “the suit” seem to co-exist.
I didn’t expect to enjoy Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman quite as much as I did. Being a city boy myself, the Patagonia brand has always been peripheral to me, but that’s fine. I am not the target consumer for this company that has masterfully scaled itself in tune to its customer and ultimately, their competitive and ecological environments. I could see this book being assigned reading in the right business school and the right program. Yvon Chouinard truly is the “reluctant businessman” who by trial and error, was able to find his calling and build a successful enterprise. His unwavering focus on his target customer is one of Patagonia’s key strengths. All decisions are driven by this focus, and the result is a company that produces high quality specialized products that not only reflect customer’s needs, but also their values. While he gives a recipe for building strong companies and brands, he also struggles with being a part of humans’ inevitable impact on the environment.
While Patagonia’s story is perhaps one of narrowing one’s field of vision to a zen-like focus, one of the most challenging components of running a business, or indeed, dealing with the complexity of our world is structure and organization. Dee Hock’s One from Many makes a compelling case that the traditional hierarchical, command and control structure of most business is an inefficient and inflexible approach. Drawing on examples including the Internet, Alcoholics Anonymous (!) and the company he founded, Visa, Hock makes the case that “learning organizations” with a shared mission and enlightened, flexible governance structure can compete successfully and effectively with traditional organizations and have a much greater success rate. Based on ideas about self-organization and self-governing in human enterprise as well as nature, Hock coins the word “chaordic,” which blends chaos and order. In fact, the former CEO of VISA posits that chaordic organizations are mankind’s best hope for mankind and ultimately solving some of our most intractable problems.
Hock’s blend of philosophy, nature (both human and mother) and other wide ranging fields of study is intellectually impressive. His stories of actually making money at it demonstrate his practical implementation of the ideas as well. As of 2004, Hock’s company, Visa, serves one billion people at 20 million merchant locations around the world, processing $3.2 trillion of goods and services. Yet, Visa has been simply a collective of competing banks who put their individual or industry rivalry aside to create policies for the benefit of the larger group (however, as of this writing, Visa is quietly preparing for an IPO). Dee Hock’s fascinating story of the creation of Visa eventually leads us to his fundamental questions: why are so many institutions increasingly unable to effectively manage their affairs; why are the people in these organizations becoming more disconnected from these institutions; and why our society and biosphere are so close to collapse. Both Chouinard and Hock’s philosophies are inspiring, accessible and worthy of a try.
