David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…And one of the most interesting characters in anything we've ever studied, because he's not a tycoon the way that most of these people are. No, and we're going to talk about more about Dee in a minute, but just to keep the story going so we don't leave you all in suspense on Dee's day. During the lunch break, Dee has gotten put on this committee. He goes up to the two B of A guys and he's like, hey, rather than us just putting together a list of grievances and reporting back to you at B of A, what if instead, we do examine all the problems in this system, but what if we ourselves, this committee, design and propose a new way of operating the whole thing? After some convincing, the B of A guys are like, sure. They're not agreeing to anything. Their goal is just to escape the mob anyway. They're like, whatever, if this makes you happy, if this lets us escape back to California, sure. Probably, almost assuredly, this is a committee we're talking about, nothing is going to come of this. The whole summit reconvenes after lunch. Dee gets up on stage, not the Bank of America guys, and he proposes this idea to the group. He said, hey, we've got this committee. Rather than us taking a list of grievances back to B of A, what if we try to design a new way that the system could operate and operate better for everyone? They take a vote on it. Everybody agrees, mostly, I think just because they wanted to get out of there, go back home, and away from this disaster of a meeting. They all get on planes, they all leave. Most of them probably think that nothing is ever going to come of this. Certainly the B of A guys thinking nothing is ever going to come of this, but Dee thinks he just got authorization to go create Visa. A whole new system. He has no power at this point, but he thinks he does. Okay, David, Dee Hock thinks he's got a mandate to go change things up in a big way and create some big crazy new proposal.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.