20 Steps in Orbiting the Giant Hairball

Yes, we all know the giant hairball.

As Visual Ambassador, my job is to translate and bridge that gap between art and commerce. I spend each day trying to break out of the atmosphere and maintain a low corporate orbit. Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie is old by business book standards (1996), but it could have easily been written yesterday. Orbiting the Giant Hairball draws on MacKenzie’s decades at Hallmark to describe how he (at times) escaped the gravitational pull of stifling corporate bureaucracy and helped himself and others achieve a state of creative achievement by “orbiting” the corporation. Using its mass as an additive slingshot instead of participating in its planetary dysfunction through endless rules, policies, procedures, management layers and practices. Each “rule” is like a little hair that gets connected or knotted to other hairs, and the result is a giant hairball.

I absolutely loved this book and view it as a business bible. It’s a very quick read… I was inspired, grasping for anything concrete I could take from it. Hairball is filled with doodles, amusing stories, anecdotes and parables, but it is not exactly chock full of practical, actionable advice. It’s more of a book to draw inspiration from, to reconfirm your commitment to orbiting, and not a place to look for tactics and actionable advice. With that apparent limitation in mind, I decided to go back over the book for this review and see if there was more actionable information I could extract. Here is what I found…

Distilled advice from Orbiting the Giant Hairball

1. Throughout our entire education and work careers, authority figures have worked to suppress our uniqueness and creativity. No authority figure will ever bless your own particular genius. Give up waiting for that to happen. Reject the status quo, embrace your creativity, be your own authority figure.

2. Orbiting is operating beyond the bounds of the corporate perception of reality. The corporate mind set is to protect and repeat past successes. Your personal energy is the thrust of the rocket that will put you into orbit. Too little and you fall back into the hair ball, too much and you escape orbit (presumably being fired or quitting)

3. Allow yourself to play and to fly off on tangents. Every tangent won’t pay off, but tangents are the only place where the creativity and innovation happen.

4. Don’t abandon your unique views, perspectives, goals and aspirations to adopt those of the corporation. They are the only unique value you can offer the company. Instead, find the places where there is overlap between your desires and the corporations and focus exclusively and relentlessly on those overlaps. Ignore the views, perspectives, goals and aspirations of the corporation that are not also your own because you cannot add any unique value there.

5. Reject the busy man syndrome that measures importance and takes pride in how busy you can keep yourself. Reject seeking the stamp of approval you think you’ll achieve from your bosses and peers by being heroically overworked. Instead employ your skills to master your job and get it done faster and easier. Faster and smarter, not longer and harder.

6. Creative breakthroughs take time and a long leash. Creativity cannot be measured, mandated, commanded or controlled. Take the long leash and, when you are in the position to, give the long leash.

7. Have the courage to challenge boundaries and at the same time (and deeply intertwined with) have the courage to admit to idiocy, impasse and the need for help.

8. Success is achieved through the non-rational art of groping about uncertainly. The corporate hair ball will do a good job of following along behind the successes you grope into and make them rote and repeatable. Without the continual groping ahead, there is only stagnation and death.

9. Ignore your job description.

10. Find the place between complete freedom and complete security that is optimal for you. Do this deliberately, continuously, and mindfully.

11. Escape the “no” side of your brain through “trans-rational” intuitive thinking. This is invoked by Art, Play, Imagination, Magic and Myth and by taking time to shut-up the “here is why it won’t work” part of your (and your colleagues) brain.

12. Never ever tease anyone about anything. It is never affectionate.

13. Don’t play a part. Be yourself…raw and human. Don’t mask your humanity in an attempt to get the A+ evaluation from your boss.The price, your humanity, is too steep.

14. This one was already practical: “Anytime a bureaucrat or a custodian of the status quo stands between you and something you need or want, your challenge is to show the bureaucrat a means to meet your need that is harmonious with the system.”

15. The corporation officially praises innovation while subverting all attempts at implementing anything novel. There is no end to the people saying ‘no’. You can’t add any value by being another one of the infinite nay sayers. Listen non-judgementally and be the person that says ‘yes’.

16. The corporation is an organism, and like all living organisms, the only escape from death is propagation. Groping + luck + hard work = success. But no amount of preservation can prevent the eventual atrophy and death of that initial success. The only path to perpetual life is propagation. Propagating happens through more groping and putting the needs of the offspring ahead of the needs of the parents.

17. Don’t organize into functionally silos, pyramids of divisions and departments. Organize into holistic groups where all the functions needed are present.

18. In order to create anything new, you must escape from the hairball of the corporation’s history and habitual culture. Creation is genesis and comes before history.

19. If you are in a leadership position, allow those you lead to lead when they want to. They won’t always want to, and doing so does not relinquish your power… it enhances it, and to everyone’s benefit.

20. Reject society’s paint by numbers plan for your life, paint the brightest, boldest, fiercest painting you can dream up.

While there is no step-by-step recipe provided, Hairball is in fact more actionable than even two reads led me to believe. It took some work to ferret out the meat that I suspected had to be there buried in the amusing stories, but the above list was worth it. Gordon is truely a innovative saint.