Success Quote by Dee Hock

Hock flips a common hiring platitude on its head: “experience” isn’t the scarce asset we pretend it is. In his telling, it’s closer to a tool than a virtue - easy to hand over, quick to deploy - as long as the person holding it already has the harder-to-teach traits. The line quietly demotes the resume and elevates character: judgment, curiosity, integrity, adaptability, the ability to learn fast without breaking things.

The subtext is a critique of bureaucratic credentialism, the corporate habit of using “years in role” as a proxy for competence because it’s measurable and defensible. Experience makes for tidy job descriptions and low-risk justifications; “other qualities” are messier, revealed under pressure, and harder to quantify in an interview loop. Hock, who founded Visa and spent a career thinking about “chaordic” organizations (part chaos, part order), knew that complex systems punish the experienced who can’t revise their mental models - and reward the less seasoned who can.

There’s also a managerial tell embedded here: good organizations treat experience as something they can manufacture through exposure, mentorship, and real responsibility, not something they must purchase at a premium. The intent isn’t anti-expertise; it’s anti-idolatry. Hock is arguing that the real competitive advantage is building people who can metabolize experience quickly, not collecting people who’ve merely been around.