Orbiting the Giant Hairball

Gordon MacKenzie, Viking, 1998.

Review by Jeff Goodwin, University of Idaho.

This is as much as of a "how to revive your creative side" as it is a leadership book. MacKenzie worked for 30 years in the Hallmark Card Company, considered to be a place where you would find many creative people at work. But even a "creative" company has its ingrained corporate structure.

The hairball of the title is actually a simile for the bureaucracy of the organization or institution for which you work. The jest of the book is to explain how you can orbit far enough away from the hairball without getting entangled in it while at the same time not straying too far away as to become unemployed.

This is a very unusual book. Great to get the creative part of your brain going. First there are many doodles on many of the pages and some pages are straight from a yellow legal pad. Chapter 19 of the book is entitled Orville Wright and the entire text of that chapter is as follows: "Orville Wright did not have a pilot's license."

MacKenzie also compares the traditional top-down organizational chart (pyramid) with his version of the ideal organizational chart. Mackenzie's organizational chart is a drawing of a plum tree. The trunk is top management or central support structure for the organization. The managers and supervisors are depicted as main branches to support product and producers. The roots are depicted as financial resources. The product (fruit) and the product creators (leaves) are at the top of this organizational chart. One other comparison that MacKenzie makes between this chart and the typical top-down pyramid is that a pyramid is a tomb while a tree is a living organism.

The book not only offers ideas to look at things differently it also provides motivation to just get off your butt and do something. An example of this can be found in the final two sentences of the book are at the conclusion of a chapter entitled Paint Me a Masterpiece. "If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it. Only you."

If you are easily bored with "conventional thinking" and enjoy spending time on the "outside of the box" this is the book for you.