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Dee Hock, Domain Dependence and Empathy & Understanding
Alex Brogan
June 18, 2025 • Read Time: 11 minutes
In partnership with
This edition is brought to you by StartEngine
Good morning to all new and old readers! Here is your Wednesday edition of Faster Than Normal, exploring one short story about a person, a company, a high-performance tool, a trend I’m watching closely, and curated media to help you build businesses, wealth, and the most important asset of all: yourself.
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Today’s edition:
> Stories: Dee Hock & AstraZeneca
> High-performance: Domain Dependence
> Insights: The necessary ingredients for inventing
> Tactical: Empathy and understanding
> 1 Question: Mastery pursuit
Cheers,
Alex
P.S. Send me feedback on how we can improve. I respond to every email.
Stories of Excellence
Person: Dee Hock
Dee Hock, founder and CEO of Visa from 1970 to 1984, revolutionized the credit card industry. He created a new organizational structure - the "chaordic" model - that blended chaos and order. This allowed Visa to become a global powerhouse. Hock's vision went beyond business. He believed in distributing power and wealth more equitably. "Today's immense change requires chaotic concepts of organization that can more equitably distribute power and wealth, unshackle human ingenuity, and restore harmony between societal organizations, the human spirit, and the biosphere," he said. After retiring, Hock became an author and speaker. He shared his ideas on leadership and organizational design. His legacy? A company that processes trillions in transactions annually. And a management philosophy that continues to influence business thinkers today.
Key Lessons from Dee Hock:
On self-management: "The first and paramount responsibility of anyone who reports to manage is to manage one's own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, temperament, words, and acts."
On authentic leadership: "Don't live how you think you 'ought to live', be authentic and lead the way."
On continuous learning: "All knowledge is an approximation."
Company: AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca was formed in 1999 through the merger of Swedish Astra AB and British Zeneca Group. The company's roots trace back to 1913 when Astra was founded in Södertälje, Sweden. Zeneca emerged from Imperial Chemical Industries in 1993. The merger created one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. AstraZeneca's early focus was on gastrointestinal and cardiovascular medicines. Key milestones include the launch of blockbuster drugs like Nexium and Crestor. In 2020, AstraZeneca gained global attention for its COVID-19 vaccine development. The company reported revenues of ~$45 billion in 2024, with over 83,000 employees worldwide. AstraZeneca continues to be a leader in oncology, respiratory, and immunology treatments.
Key Lessons from AstraZeneca:
On risk-taking: Embrace failure. AstraZeneca's "5R" framework encourages scientists to take big swings. Most will miss. But the hits are huge. "If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough," said EVP Mene Pangalos.
On focus: Pick your battles. AstraZeneca narrowed its therapeutic focus over time. Oncology. Respiratory. Cardiovascular. Better to dominate a few areas than be mediocre in many.
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Accelerants
High-performance tool
⎯
Domain Dependence
What you master in one domain (area) is difficult to transfer to another.
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.”
—Yogi Berra
Expand your areas of learning and don’t become trapped by single domains.
Insights
Claude Shannon on the necessary ingredients for inventing:
"I think we could set down three things that are fairly necessary for scientific research or for any sort of inventing or mathematics or physics or anything along that line. I don’t think a person can get along without any one of these three.
The first one is obvious – training and experience. You don’t expect a lawyer, however bright he may be, to give you a new theory of physics these days or mathematics or engineering.
The second thing is a certain amount of intelligence or talent. In other words, you have to have an IQ that is fairly high to do good research work. I don’t think that there is any good engineer or scientist that can get along on an IQ of 100, which is the average for human beings. In other words, he has to have an IQ higher than that. Everyone in this room is considerably above that. This, we might say, is a matter of environment; intelligence is a matter of heredity.
Those two I don’t think are sufficient. I think there is a third constituent here, a third component which is the one that makes an Einstein or an Isaac Newton. For want of a better word, we will call it motivation. In other words, you have to have some kind of a drive, some kind of a desire to find out the answer, a desire to find out what makes things tick. If you don’t have that, you may have all the training and intelligence in the world, you don’t have questions and you won’t just find answers. This is a hard thing to put your finger on. It is a matter of temperament probably; that is, a matter of probably early training, early childhood experiences, whether you will motivate in the direction of scientific research. I think that at a superficial level, it is blended use of several things. This is not any attempt at a deep analysis at all, but my feeling is that a good scientist has a great deal of what we can call curiosity. I won’t go any deeper into it than that. He wants to know the answers. He’s just curious how things tick and he wants to know the answers to questions; and if he sees thinks, he wants to raise questions and he wants to know the answers to those.
Then there’s the idea of dissatisfaction. By this I don’t mean a pessimistic dissatisfaction of the world – we don’t like the way things are – I mean a constructive dissatisfaction. The idea could be expressed in the words, °∞This is OK, but I think things could be done better. I think there is a neater way to do this. I think things could be improved a little. In other words, there is continually a slight irritation when things don’t look quite right; and I think that dissatisfaction in present days is a key driving force in good scientists.”
Tactical reads
⎯
> When practicing empathy and understanding others
What's going on here, with this human? (Read it here)
> When applying mathematical concepts to investing
The Kelly Criterion - Quantitative Trading (Read it here)
1 question
How do I become so good I can’t be ignored?
That’s all for today, folks. As always, please give me your feedback. Which section is your favourite? What do you want to see more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.
Have a wonderful rest of week, all.
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