Alex

Everything is accelerating change, with one incredibly important exception. There has been no loss of institutional float.

I could think of no way to fully realize the concept by including merchants and cardholders as owner/members. The slightest hint in that direction raised a storm of opposition. We should have included them. Perhaps, with more time, tenacity, and ingenuity, we could have.

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 mindless pursuit of

Everyone, any time, could see the picture emerge and evolve. They could see how the whole depended on their work, and how their work was connected to every other part of the effort. [...] To be able to get one's own work done and help another became a sought-after privilege.

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.

Efforts to make information conform to archaic notions of scarcity, ownership, and finite physical quantity--concepts that grew out of the agricultural and industrial age--merely lock us into old mental boxes of constraint and exploitation.

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

Think of it as a reverse holding company. The regulations to which each party must submit are created by them. Any time a member does not like what has been created, they are free to walk away without obligation. It is an open, enabling, self-governing organization.

How much time, energy, and ingenuity did they spend obeying senseless rules and procedures that had little to do with the results they were expected to achieve?