One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organizati…

Nor is corporate power restricted to power over the employed. Global corporations now have implicit sovereignty over people throughout the world, since they are beyond the reach of any nation-state. [...] They do so by the simple expedient of bargaining one government against another for the claimed economic benefit of their presence.

the essence of community, its very heart and soul, is the nonmonetary exchange of value [...] It arises from deep, intuitive, understanding that self-interest is inseparably connected with community interest

Understanding events and influencing the future requires mastering of four ways of looking at things: as they were, as they are, as they might become, and as they ought to be.

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

organizations increasingly unable to achieve the purpose for which they were created, yet continuing to expand as they devour resources, demean the human spirit, and destroy the environment

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

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.

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!

Could such an organization be patterned on biological concepts and methods? [...] What if we quit arguing about the structure of a new institution and tried to think of it as having some sort of genetic code?