The Future Is Uncentralized

Donald C. Stone Lecture I. I am very grateful to Mary Hamilton and the others who arranged my "homecoming" to ASPA this week. I started my working life as a public administration intern 61 years ago; and though I've tried what looks like a variety of professions, I always thought of myself as a public executive--and a writer of words designed to be useful to public executives. That internship year was a bonanza: it led before long to a wedding. My not-yet wife Lois was really a pianist, but at Willamette University in Oregon she changed her major when her favorite piano teacher left. On the sound theory that in college you take professors, not courses, she selected an exciting new professor who was just starting a public administration major. She became his first graduate, and was selected for an internship in Washington, starting in the fall of 1939. I was at Oxford just then; but my Rhodes Scholarship was suspended that fall when Hitler's invasion of Poland started World War II. I was attracted by the dynamism of President Roosevelt's New Deal, and was accepted as a latecomer in Lois's intern program. That collection of accidents turned out pretty well: we're now in our 59th year of a very happy marriage. That was also the year when we first came to know and admire Don Stone. He was already a "wheel" in President Roosevelt's New Deal bureaucracy, an assistant director in the Bureau of the Budget--which, the way FDR ran things, was more or less in charge of the whole Executive Branch. Don Stone quickly became, for us, a role model, a prime example of what it could mean to be a professional public administrator. Later I worked with him in the Marshall Plan; we shared a lively lifelong interest in international affairs, and kept in touch through ASPA and the National Academy. I'm delighted to be here to celebrate his life, his career, and thus the profession of public administration. II. I've undertaken to talk with you today about uncentralization. Let's start with a short but provocative question: "If you think you can't, why think? " This can-do aphorism comes from the pioneer who helped invent, then brought to stunning success, the remarkably uncentralized enterprise called VISA International. Philosopher-executive Dee Hock, a local banker in Seattle, had been brooding for years about why modern institutions seemed to depend so much on "compelled behavior," which he considered a "disguised form of tyranny. " "The organization of the future," he had come to believe, "will be the embodiment of community based on shared purpose calling to the higher aspirations of people. " Most of us who ponder walking-in-the-woods thoughts like these don't get to try them on for size in the real world. But through a series of improbable accidents this small-bank vice president got a chance to organize a deliberately uncentralized company that, three decades later, now handles the world's largest block of consumer purchasing power. Owned by 22,000 financial institutions, accepted by 15 million merchants in more than 200 countries, the "products" of VISA International are used by three-quarters of a billion people to make 14 billion transactions a year worth $1.25 trillion. And during its first three decades, it has been growing by 20 to 50 percent a year. Hock is now promoting a new vocabulary to help us talk about how to organize without centralizing. His keyword is "chaord," a fusion of chaos and order. His recent book, Birth of the Chaordic World, tells the dramatic story of VISA's origins. He doesn't claim VISA as a "model. " But it stands as a very large and very successful example of some very practical ideas about human organization that will, I believe, come to characterize the twenty-first century. III. In the century we just said goodbye to, we learned again and again that complex social systems work badly if they are too centralized. …