Alex

Making good judgments and acting wisely when one has complete data, facts, and information is not leadership. It's not even management. It's bookkeeping.

It had all the characteristics of the bank card mess of the late sixties. The internal strife was immense, pitting one segment of the industry with another in constant conflict for dominance. Each segment had messiahs preaching one gospel or another--governmental monopoly, unrestrained competition, state regulation, vertical integration,

Many took the openness and liberty of Visa as applicable to them, but not in relation to those over whom they had authority.

Competition and cooperation are not contraries. They have no opposite meaning. They are complimentary. [...] Cooperation gone mad results in the mindless pursuit of equality, use of centralized force to achieve uniformity, ever-increasing coercion to sustain it, and eventual slavery. Competition gone mad results in the mind

At such times, it is no failure to fall short of realizing all that we might dream: The failure is to fall short of dreaming all that we might realize. We must try!

After sharing the Visa story and underlying concepts, I told a small story. [...] Why then does such a system still lie dormant in the field of health? The answer is not complicated. Who would you trust to own and control such a system? [...] Only with the evolution of a chaordic organization in which all relevant and affected p

By the standards of what Visa ought to be, it would be a lie to deny a sense of failure.

Data, on one end of the spectrum, is separable, objective, linear, mechanistic, and abundant. Wisdom, on the other end of the spectrum, is holistic, subjective, spiritual, conceptual, creative, and scarce. [...] Today we are drowning in a raging flood of new data and information and the raft of wisdom to which we desperately cling is breaking

When speaking of others, rarely was a person referred to by name. The language suggested object or thing, not person. There was classification of individuals by nationality, race, or religious origination, and generalizations about each class. There was reluctance to deal with others as individual human beings. There was even gr