Dee Hock

American banker and founder of Visa International, who convinced competing banks to surrender individual control of their credit card programs into a shared network organization — the 'chaordic' structure (chaotic yet orderly) that he believed was necessary for a system no single institution could own.

Designed Visa's governance structure — a network owned by all its member banks, controlled by none — solving the coordination problem of getting competing banks to cooperate on shared infrastructure by making the network itself sovereign, a model that became the blueprint for subsequent payment networks.