Aging & Wisdom Quote by Dee Hock

Hock’s line lands because it flips the usual corporate myth: that innovation is a scarce resource you have to “generate.” He suggests the opposite - ideas are plentiful; it’s the mental clutter that’s scarce on clearance. Coming from the founder of Visa and an apostle of “chaordic” organizations, the point isn’t inspirational wallpaper. It’s a diagnosis of why institutions that claim to worship disruption keep reproducing the same meetings, the same metrics, the same safe bets.

The intent is practical, almost managerial: stop treating creativity as a brainstorming problem and start treating it as an unlearning problem. The subtext is harsher. “Old ones” aren’t just outdated beliefs; they’re incentives, status hierarchies, and identity. People cling to yesterday’s frameworks because those frameworks make them legible and valuable inside the system. Asking someone to drop an old idea is often asking them to drop a role, a track record, a sense of expertise.

The sentence also carries a quiet rebuke to innovation theater. New thoughts don’t stick when the organization’s operating system rejects them: quarterly pressures, risk-avoidance dressed up as “discipline,” and the comforting fiction that past success was earned purely by skill rather than timing and tailwinds. Hock’s phrasing makes deletion sound harder than invention, and that’s the cultural truth. Reinvention rarely fails from lack of imagination; it fails from loyalty to a story that used to work.