World Famous Comics: Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace
By: Gordon MacKenzie Publisher: Viking Adult Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Viking Adult Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 224 Publication Date: April 01, 1998
Book Description: Creativity is crucial to business success. But too often, even the most innovative organization quickly becomes a "giant hairball"--a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions, and systems, all based on what worked in the past--that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity. Gordon McKenzie worked at Hallmark Cards for thirty years, many of which he spent inspiring his colleagues to slip the bonds of Corporate Normalcy and rise to orbit--to a mode of dreaming, daring and doing above and beyond the rubber-stamp confines of the administrative mind-set. In his deeply funny book, exuberantly illustrated in full color, he shares the story of his own professional evolution, together with lessons on awakening and fostering creative genius.
Originally self-published and already a business "cult classic", this personally empowering and entertaining look at the intersection between human creativity and the bottom line is now widely available to bookstores. It will be a must-read for any manager looking for new ways to invigorate employees, and any professional who wants to achieve his or her best, most self-expressive, most creative and fulfilling work.
If Tom Robbins wrote a business handbook Judging by the evidence of this book, Gordon MacKenzie is a twinkling, Merry Prankster-esque holy fool, a cubicle-farm Patch Adams, out to shake up the grey-carpeted halls of corporate America with his own blend of studiedly random wackiness. As other reviewers have said, there is little in the way of practical, take-away advice in this book, and that might well be how MacKenzie wants it -- telling people how they should be is such an authority trip, man. But it leaves you with very little in the end, other than MacKenzie's self-satisfaction and a lot of fake-amateurish scribbling and marginalia. A few nuggets float to the surface here and there; I noted with interest how he told a group of timid executives to "make marks" on paper instead of draw on it, as "drawing" prompts anxiety in people not used to acting creatively. If MacKenzie could've deigned to offer a little more in that vein, this would have been a valuable book.
Invaluable Creativity, Leadership & Corporate Survival Guide A fantastic read about maintaining & continuing to develop your personal creativity, while not allowing yourself to be stifled by corporate culture. This book has amazing & entertaining color illustrations depicting MacKenzie's personal experiences while working for 30 years at Hallmark Cards, not to mention being filled with extremely funny anecdotes. I found myself wondering several times while reading this book whether the author would have been able to continue to develop his creativity so well if he had not been so fortunate as to find himself with a plum job at Hallmark in the first place. Nonetheless, this book is well worth reading. I think that anyone, at any rung of the corporate ladder, could learn valuable survival & leadership tips from & relate well with Orbiting the Giant Hairball.
Living Outside the Box and Coloring Outside the Lines. For those who were born living outside the box and coloring outside the lines..........this book was written for us. Humorous, accurate and great advice on how to survive and even thrive within a large company/corporation.
I clearly understand the dynamics he writes about. I survived and even thrived for the last 10 of my 28 years in a large company. I wish I would have had this book back then. It would have helped me figure out how to fly below the radar even quicker than I did.
Great read I bought it for my staff and made it a mandatory read and we talk about it in our weekly staff meeting.
Easy and inspiring The author's story of how he survived corporate life is very inspiring, and told as it is in short vignettes, it's very easy to read. I recommend it for anyone involved in a less than ideal work situation.
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