Alex

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

Visa was a quasi-governmental, quasi-for-profit, quasi-consulting, [...] It was none of them, yet it was all of them. It was chaordic. In the strict legal sense, Visa was a nonstock, for-profit, membership organization. [...] The financial institutions that create its products were, at one and the same time, its owners, its

It came to me that forming and building NBI, or anything of worth, is much the same. It requires sound material, a good tool, a capable hand and, most important, a vision of things to come. It requires patience and persistence to pursue the vision chip, by chip, by chip, and willingness to change the vision as the nature of the material i

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

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.

we must get beyond numbers and the language of mathematics in order to understand, evaluate, and account for such intangibles as learning, intellectual capital, community, beliefs, and principles

The possibility of that which has never occurred cannot be determined by opinion -- only by an attempt.