The Hock Principle

Widely attributed to Dee Hock, founder of Visa, and commonly called “The Hock Principle.” The line has not been traced to a verbatim primary source. The earliest documented print appearance is an August 1998 Cutter newsletter, and the page at deewhock.com dates the line to his July 1994 talk “The Lesson of the One Horned Cow,” delivered to the Graduate School of Bankcard Management. That page recommends citing it as simply “Dee W. Hock, 1994.”

The aphorism’s specific wording has not been pinned to a page, but the thesis is one Hock argued at length in his own writing. In his 2000 essay “The Art of Chaordic Leadership” (Leader to Leader No. 15, Winter 2000), built around the same One Horned Cow rescue story from the 1994 talk, he puts the first half this way: “a clear, constructive purpose and compelling ethical principles evoked from and shared by all participants should be the essence of every relationship in every institution.” The cause he names for the opposite outcome is “mechanistic, Industrial Age, dominator concepts of organization and the management practices they spawn.” The aphorism is the slogan version of that argument.

The phrase is shorthand for the management style Hock spent his late career arguing against: organizations modeled on industrial-age mass production, with people slotted into fixed roles and graded by their compliance with rules from above. The sentence right before it in the essay names what Hock thinks it costs. Human ingenuity, he writes, is “the most abundant, least expensive, most under-utilized, and constantly abused resource in the world.” That is the second half of the aphorism in concrete form: detailed rules produce compliance and gaming, both of which substitute for the judgment complex work actually requires.