[Neurons] 2014 "Neurons" Meta Reflections #7

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2014  #7

Feb. 17, 2014

 

 

 

ON THE PIONEERING

A SELF-ACTUALIZING COMPANY

 

 

Is it possible to write a whole book about seeking to create a whole new
kind of organization, a self-actualization company, and never use those
phrase self-actualization?  Is it possible to read such a book and not even
realize that it is a book seeking to create an organization that is so new
and radical that it meets all of the criteria of what we call
"self-actualization?"  My sad answer to these questions is that "Yes, it is
possible."  That's because Dee Hock wrote the book without using the
terminology and that's because I read his book without realizing what it is
truly about.  Here's the story and the amazing discovery that I made.

 

Dee Hock was the founder and CEO of VISA international and when he retired,
he became the CEO Emeritus.  Then in 1991 he became one of thirty living
Laureates of the Business Hall of Fame.   "In 1992 he was recognized as one
of the eight individuals who most changed the way people live in the past
quarter century."  Pretty impressive, right?   Well, that's just the
beginning.  There's a lot more.

 

If there was ever an unconventional CEO, a CEO who didn't fit the image or
title, a CEO who wrote against the whole way organizations are structured
and run-it was Dee Hock.  In this book which is both his autobiography and
his description of the birth of VISA, he describes himself as a "lamb" in
his early decades of his career-a lamb in the midst of the wolves of
business.   He describes himself as a country boy, raised with very little
and for most of his career making very little and all along observing and
hating all of the worst features of modern corporations.

 

He also describes himself as a thinker and philosopher at heart- someone who
kept thinking that there had to be a better way to organize organizations.
Now what I found amazing- even to the point of being incredible- is that in
the process Dee Hock, long before NLP, denominalized many of the facets of
organizations and got to "the essences" of organizational life and then
identified most of the features of a self-actualizing company.  He did that
without NLP training.  He did that, apparently, without reading anything
from Maslow, Rogers, or the early Human Potential Movement leaders.

 

Consider his de-nominalizing activities.  Without knowing that a set of
actions (which should be described by a verb) can be nounified (nominalized)
to create a false noun which sounds like a real "thing," but is not, Dee
Hock in his book, Birth of the Chaordic Age (1999) de-nominalized numerous
false nouns: Leadership, organization, money, corporations, accounting,
banking, governance.

Now, of course, he doesn't call this de-nominalizing.  How could he?  He was
no linguist.  He apparently knew nothing about Transformational Grammar
(TG).  In fact, he was doing his work while Noam Chomsky was developing TG.
He called this process peeling the onion.  And he went about "peeling the
onion with questions" (p. 266), questions that challenged the specifics of
the word, indexing questions about what, when, where, how, which, in what
way, etc.  About "corporations" he wrote that:

"If it [the new organization] was to be different, we must peel the
corporate onion to its essence.  We began with the dry skeletons one finds
in the dusty closets of dictionary and encyclopedia." (167)

 

Now in the process he discovered something that we know in philosophy, in
NLP, in Neuro-Semantics- an organization and what we call a "corporation" is
a "mental abstraction." "Organizations exist only in the mind; they are no
more than conceptual embodiments of the ancient idea of community." (11).

"Institutions are not a law of nature ... institutions are the creations of
people. ... The problem arises from the pervasive habit of perceiving an
institution as a tangible, physical reality, such as a building or a
machine.  So , when anyone began to talk or act as though a company had such
reality; I would assure them that it was a fiction, that it did not exist.
Most would argue vociferously that it certainly did.   I would test their
convictions with a simple exercise . . .

"Surely you have seen it.  What color is it?  No?  Well, then, you must have
smelled it from time to time.  Describe its odor.  No?  Then surely you've
tasted it.  So it sweet or sour, tart or bland?  You don't know?  Well, you
must have touched it often.  Is it hot or cold, hard or soft?  No?  Then,
without doubt you have heard it.  Make its sound.  No?  Can you perceive the
company you work for , or any other organization, whether political, social,
or commercial, with any of your senses?  Obviously not. . .  perhaps it's a
fiction.

"The truth is that a commercial company, or for that matter, any
organization, is nothing but an idea.  All institutions are no more than a
mental construct to which people are drawn in pursuit of common purpose; a
conceptual embodiment of a very old, very powerful idea called community.
All organizations can be no more and no less than the moving force of the
mind, heart, and spirit of people, without which all assets are just so much
inert mineral, chemical, or vegetable mater..." (119)

 

If I didn't know the source of that quotation, I would bet the author knew
NLP.  But no.  By recognizing that the language of company, organization,
corporation, etc. is at the level of abstraction and not at the level of
empirical sensory-based information, Hock was able to get to the essence of
this concept and begin to re-conceptualize it.

 

He did the same thing with term "money."  "I continued to peel our onion of
understanding looking for the essence of money." (122).  He did that because
he was in the banking industry and of course, banking has to do with
money-saving, loaning, investing, etc. 

"Peeling this onion of understanding was enough to make us cry.  The essence
of money seemed to be everywhere, yet nowhere. But we had to understand.
More research, more digging, more connections. ... [then]...  Our
perceptions began to change.  It was as though we could now see with
different eyes.  Even more, with a different mind.  Even beyond that: with a
different consciousness, and it was incredibly exciting. ...   We continued
to peel the onion.  Just what was the nature of the business [banking] in
which we were engaged?" (123)

 

Dee Hock discovered back in the early 1960s what I discovered much, much
later and wrote in the book Inside-Out Wealth-something I discovered through
the key thinkers in the field of wealth creation.  Money isn't wealth.  And
wealth is certainty not limited to money (financial wealth), it is much more
holistic than that.

"What was money? ... Money was not coin, currency, or credit card.  That was
the form, not function.  Money was anything customarily used as a measure of
equivalent value and medium of exchange." (121)

"The realization slowly dawned t hat money had become alphanumeric symbols
recorded and transported on valueless metal and paper ... a gap in
understanding, for symbols themselves have no value.  Anyone could write
down letters and numbers..."

 

Then the discovery came:

"Money had become guaranteed alphanumeric data expressed in the currency
symbol of one country or another.  Thus, a bank was no more than an
institution for the custody, loan, and exchange of guaranteed alphanumeric
data." (122)

 

Now he had to figure out what data or information was.  And for that he
turned to Gregory Bateson: "information is a difference that makes a
difference."  And that led him to understand that unlike the world of
tangible things- things t hat you can handle and manipulate, that you can
count and weigh- the world of intangible things like ideas, data,
information work by an en tirely different principle.  They work not by the
principle of scarcity but by the principle of abundance.

"Unlike finite physical resources, information multiplies by transfer and is
not depleted by use.  Information transferred is not lost to the source yet
is a gain to the recipient.  Information an be utilized by everyone without
loss to anyone. ... It obeys only concepts and principles of infinite
abundance..." (199)

 

And in this way, while never using the language of D-needs (deficiency) or
B-needs (being and abundance), Hock was re-imagining one of the most staid
and dry and tangible institutions of them all- Banking.  And out of that
eventually came a whole new type of organization-what I call a
Self-Actualizing Company, but which he called a Chaordic organization.

 

There's a lot more to this story.  So until next time- if you don't know how
to de-nominalize, at least use precision questions to peel back the onion of
abstraction in the vague words that we all swim in everyday!  And if tears
come from peeling the onion- know they are tears of joy and discovery of the
real world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

                Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net


     

    

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