Success Quote by Dee Hock

Dee Hock isn’t selling diversity as a moral accessory; he’s describing it as an operating system for institutions that want to survive reality. The line starts with a deceptively practical verb stack - employ, trust, reward - which quietly raises the bar each time. Hiring people who think differently is easy to applaud and easy to contain. Trusting them means letting their dissent alter decisions. Rewarding them means making difference a career advantage rather than a tolerated quirk. Hock’s intent is managerial, but the subtext is almost constitutional: power has to be structured so it can be contradicted.

The phrase “radically different” matters. He’s not talking about harmless variety (the kind that shows up in company recruiting brochures) but perspectives that feel inconvenient, even threatening, to the leader’s self-image. That’s why he pairs the prescription with a blunt diagnosis: it’s rare. Most organizations claim to want candor while designing incentives that punish it - promotion paths that favor agreeable operators, meetings where “alignment” is code for obedience, performance reviews that treat skepticism as negativity.

Contextually, Hock helped found Visa and became famous for championing “chaordic” organizations: systems balanced between chaos and order, distributed enough to adapt without collapsing into anarchy. In that world, humility isn’t a personality trait; it’s a governance requirement. Tolerance isn’t politeness; it’s the capacity to stay in relationship with people who could be right. Wisdom is the final, harder turn: knowing when difference should steer the ship, and when it’s just noise.