The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock, the Radical Who Organized Visa (2012)
m.fastcompany.com
m.fastcompany.com
There are other organizations with similar organizational problems. Most are financial clearing houses, such as Depository Trust Company. In the past, the Association of American Railroads acted as a clearing house for railroad cars. (When a railroad car is not on its "home road", the borrowing railroad pays a daily rental to the owning railroad. One of the AAR's functions was being the clearinghouse for that and other inter-line billing issues.) The AAR is still the standards organization for railroad equipment. It's owned by the big railroads. That's typical of industry organizations; they're dominated by the big companies.
Visa was a chaord because the US used to have a lot of small banks, and the small banks wanted a system that wasn't controlled by the big banks. As the financial industry consolidated, this became less of an issue. Visa International is no longer a chaord; it went public a few years ago.
I disagree on that. The Visa model works because at every single turn there is a clear, shared understanding of what the single purpose of the whole thing is: Process payments.
The same is emphatically not true for the internet, just look at net neutrality. That's a pretty simple but very fundamental concept, and there's nowhere near consensus on the matter. Or even without considering NN, the fact that Netflix and Skype are eating the lunches of the very companies that own and operate most of the consumer internet (telcos and cable cos). It's hard to imagine a similar conflict at Visa, yet the internet's history is riddled with them, and the fallout from their incomplete resolutions.
Incidentally, this clarity is also why Visa would probably be fundamentally ill-suited to deal with an existential threat, e.g. of the sort some people imagine bitcoin to be.
Experience suggests this doesn't work so well in practise.
An example: Visa are beholden to their members for funding and the largest members hold disproportionate power. Barclaycard in the UK is one such member and routinely prevent Visa from adopting new standards, or marketing on behalf of the entire group, for fear that it would weaken the dominance of Barclaycard in the UK. Which is why, for UK readers, you never see Visa advertising and only ever see bank/lender advertising... whereas elsewhere in Europe you'll see Visa advertising directly (for the benefit of all members).
The structure that they have has contributed to holding the industry back as a whole, almost as much as it pushed things forward in the early days.
On initial reading, I wondered if an analogy could be made with the organic growth of computer technology through developing protocols and standards, looking at the growth in USB devices as an example.
There are probably finer details that I'm missing out on, would be interested to learn more about the chaordic approach to building social structures.
Modelling organic growth of a company according to biological growth, is quite mind-bending.