Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace

My new favorite book… Didn’t think I’d like it initially but the deeper I got into this book the more I relished MacKenzie's description and understanding of how bureaucracies function and miss-function, and how creative people can nevertheless work fruitfully in the “Hairball.” Fun read. Story of my life - being anti-bureaucratically bureaucratic. By the way, "bureaucracy" is the art of getting nothing done, very very slowly. Badda-bing!

Matt Harrison


Then there are those few (some still there, I hear) who manage to actively engage the opportunities Hallmark [the card co.] presents without being sucked into the Hairball of Hallmark. This is accomplished by Orbiting. Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond “accepted models, patters, or standards” – all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.

To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit from the physical, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organizations without becoming entombed in the bureaucracy of the institution.

If you are interested (and it is not for everyone), you can achieve Orbit by finding the personal courage to be genuine and to take the best course of action to get the job done rather than following the pallid path of corporate appropriateness.

To be of optimum value to the corporate endeavor, you must invest enough individuality to counteract the pull of Corporate Gravity, but not so much that you escape that pull altogether. Just enough to stay out of the Hairball.
Through this measured assertion of your own uniqueness, it is possible to establish a dynamic relationship with the Hairball – to Orbit around the institutional mass. If you do this, you make an asset of the gravity in that it becomes a force that keeps you from flying out into the overwhelming nothingness of deep space.’

But if you allow that same gravity to suck you into the bureaucratic Hairball, you will find yourself in a different kind of nothingness. The nothingness of a normalcy made stagnant by a compulsion to cling to past successes. The nothingness of the Hairball.

Gordon MacKenzie – Orbiting the Giant Hairball, Viking 1996, pp. 32-33.