"An illustration I use to get people to understand it is this: I'll ask major corporate audiences: Why don't you just take all your traditional beliefs about organizations, and apply them to the neurons in your brain?"
About this Quote
It’s a mischievous little dare disguised as a folksy metaphor: stop treating organizations like machines and start treating them like living systems. Dee Hock isn’t asking a neuroscience question so much as springing a trap for corporate common sense. If you “apply” traditional org-chart thinking to your neurons, you immediately see the absurdity. Neurons don’t report up a hierarchy. There’s no SVP of Motor Cortex issuing quarterly directives to the cerebellum. Intelligence emerges from decentralized interaction, feedback, redundancy, and constant adaptation. His intent is to make executives feel, not just understand, how brittle their inherited assumptions are.
The subtext is sharper: your management gospel is not merely outdated; it’s biologically implausible. Hock’s rhetorical move borrows authority from nature to expose the hubris of command-and-control. By invoking the brain, he smuggles in a powerful premise: the most complex, high-performing system you know doesn’t succeed by central planning, so why should your company?
Context matters. Hock, the founder CEO behind Visa’s early “chaordic” model, had skin in the argument. He’d seen a global network function through shared protocols, distributed governance, and constrained autonomy long before “platform” became a buzzword. The line is aimed at “major corporate audiences” because they’re the most invested in comforting myths: that control equals competence, that clarity requires hierarchy, that culture is a memo away.
The illustration works because it’s legible and slightly humiliating. It forces a choice: keep worshipping the org chart, or admit the future belongs to systems that think more like brains than bureaucracies.
The subtext is sharper: your management gospel is not merely outdated; it’s biologically implausible. Hock’s rhetorical move borrows authority from nature to expose the hubris of command-and-control. By invoking the brain, he smuggles in a powerful premise: the most complex, high-performing system you know doesn’t succeed by central planning, so why should your company?
Context matters. Hock, the founder CEO behind Visa’s early “chaordic” model, had skin in the argument. He’d seen a global network function through shared protocols, distributed governance, and constrained autonomy long before “platform” became a buzzword. The line is aimed at “major corporate audiences” because they’re the most invested in comforting myths: that control equals competence, that clarity requires hierarchy, that culture is a memo away.
The illustration works because it’s legible and slightly humiliating. It forces a choice: keep worshipping the org chart, or admit the future belongs to systems that think more like brains than bureaucracies.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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