Success Quote by Dee Hock

Start with your grudges, not your virtues. Dee Hock, the iconoclastic businessman behind Visa, isn’t offering a soft-focus plea for kindness; he’s prescribing a brutally practical management tool: reverse-engineer ethics from the moments you still resent. The first sentence drags leadership out of the realm of mission statements and into the body, where memory keeps receipts. “Careful list” matters. This isn’t vague self-help. It’s an audit, the same way a competent executive audits risk: name the harms, itemize the patterns, notice how easily “just how things are done” becomes a permission slip for cruelty.

The subtext is a warning about institutional amnesia. Organizations have a way of laundering bad behavior into tradition: humiliating feedback becomes “high standards,” secrecy becomes “need-to-know,” overwork becomes “commitment.” Hock flips the usual golden rule (treat others as you’d like to be treated) into something sterner and more reliable: treat people as you never wanted to be treated. It’s not aspirational; it’s preventative.

Context sharpens the edge. Hock spent his career designing systems where power is distributed and rules outlive personalities. In that world, good intentions are cheap and scale is dangerous. “Ever” lands like a governance clause: non-negotiable, independent of mood, stress, or quarterly results. The line reads as a credo for anyone with authority: your worst experiences aren’t just scars; they’re data. Use them to break the cycle before you become the person you once couldn’t stand.