Orbiting the Giant Hairball

Gordon MacKenzie spent 30 years working at Hallmark Cards, Inc., the largest social expression company in the world. Drawing on that career, he builds an extended argument about how corporate institutions suppress individual creativity and offers strategies for preserving one's creative genius within such systems. The book blends memoir, parable, and metaphor, organized not as a chronological autobiography but as thematic chapters that accumulate into a philosophy he calls "Orbiting."

MacKenzie opens with a recurring experience from his years visiting grade schools as a steel sculptor. He would ask students at each grade level how many considered themselves artists. First graders raised their hands enthusiastically. By sixth grade, almost no one did. He observed this pattern without exception and identifies it as evidence that society, in its necessary effort to teach children boundaries, inadvertently extinguishes their inborn creative genius. He describes an invisible "Genius Cartel," a conformity-enforcing pressure as old as civilization, wielded by anyone who has surrendered to the status quo. He argues that individuals must override this pressure and reclaim their genius, a process he calls "the beginning of Orbit" (24).

He then introduces the book's central metaphor. George Parker, an advertising executive who led Hallmark's Creative division, once called the division "a giant hairball" (29). MacKenzie traces Hallmark's origins to 1910, when 18-year-old Joyce Clyde Hall arrived in Kansas City with a one-way ticket and a small inventory of postcards. Because no greeting card industry existed, Hall's early decisions relied on common sense and original thinking. Each successive decision became a hair in a growing mass, and decades of accumulated policies and success formulas formed a tangled knot of corporate normalcy. MacKenzie defines Corporate Gravity as the pull this mass exerts, drawing everything into conformity with past realities and leaving no room for original thinking. He defines Orbiting as the practice of exploring beyond the corporate mindset while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission, using the Hairball's gravity as an anchoring force rather than a smothering one.

MacKenzie's first encounter with Orbiting in practice came through Hallmark's Contemporary Design department, a countercultural unit started in the 1950s during founder J.C. Hall's absence. Its director, W. Robert McCloskey, kept institutional pressures at bay while guiding renegade artists through storytelling rather than overt authority. He allowed his people to fly off on tangents, then gently transformed those tangents into productive Orbits. After transferring into Contemporary Design, MacKenzie eventually became a design supervisor, recognizing that he had become a small Hairball himself, with artists orbiting him just as supervisors orbited McCloskey, who in turn orbited the giant Hallmark Hairball.

MacKenzie cautions that one can Orbit too soon and that the Hairball can serve as a protective cocoon in which to grow, but warns that cocoons can become paralyzing. He spent years writing anti-establishment greeting cards, a compromise between his hunger for conformity's comfort and his desire to live originally. When salary increases pushed him toward middle management, he eluded that fate by becoming a self-appointed mentor, developing a mission to subvert corporate culture and provoke the emancipation of creative genius. Through this self-discovered vocation, he emerged from what he calls the Company Cocoon and ascended into Orbit, a process he equates with mythologist Joseph Campbell's concept of following one's bliss.

Several chapters develop related arguments through anecdote and parable. MacKenzie tells a story from his father's childhood on a farm in Ontario, Canada, where a cousin hypnotized roughly 70 chickens by holding their beaks to chalk lines, rendering the birds motionless. He draws a direct parallel: Organizations push employees down until their beaks are on the company line, and those who are not careful become hypnotized, separated from the unique gifts only they can contribute. He challenges the corporate culture of valorizing overwork, suggesting that when a colleague's job looks easy, one may be witnessing "a champion at play" (59) rather than a slacker. He uses a fantasy about a businessman scolding idle-looking dairy cows to illustrate that the invisible portion of any creative process, where the actual work is being generated, resembles the cow's time in the pasture. Management obsessed with measurable productivity, he argues, has little patience for this essential quiet phase.

A chapter on his "Grope" workshop illustrates the distinction between creative exploration and formulaic repetition. Asked to create a capstone session for a management training series, MacKenzie proposed a deliberately unstructured workshop. The first session generated confusion that gave way to exhilaration as creative energy emerged from intentional chaos. The second session failed because he unconsciously turned the first session's elements into a formula. He caught his mistake, discarded his notes, and the original energy returned. He equates formulaic repetition with the Hairball and creative exploration with Orbiting, arguing that organizations must honor both the rational exploitation of success and the nonrational art of groping to avoid stagnation.

At mid-career, MacKenzie experienced a crisis when corporate ambition pulled him into a licensing division under intense pressure to generate revenue. He lost his sense of proportion and began mistreating his staff. Confronted by colleagues, he sought psychotherapy and resolved to escape. He proposed a "Humor Workshop," pitched it directly to a vice president, and designed a creative workspace using antique furniture that cost less per person than standard cubicles. When bureaucrats blocked his purchase of antique milk cans as wastebaskets because they were not on the approved furniture list, his colleague Donna Livingston, an architect, suggested classifying the items as art for the corporate collection. MacKenzie draws a lasting lesson: When a bureaucrat stands between you and something you need, the challenge is to help them find a solution within their system.

After leading the Humor Workshop for three years, MacKenzie negotiated the enigmatic title "Creative Paradox" for a new role. Because the title had no meaning within Hallmark's hierarchy, middle managers assumed he held more authority than he did. Frustrated idea-generators sought him out, and he validated every idea, providing the single "yes" in a sea of institutional refusals that passionate innovators needed. He describes these final three years, with no job description and a meaningless title, as "the most enriching, fruitful, productive, joy-filled years of my entire career" (150).

Later chapters present additional frameworks. MacKenzie contrasts the pyramid organizational model, which he calls a tomb, with a plum tree model where product creators sit at the top receiving sunlight while management serves as supporting branches and trunk. He introduces "dynamic following," arguing that organizations gain real energy from followers who learn to navigate wide arcs beyond their leaders' wakes. Drawing on his own recovery from an alcohol addiction, he explores how teasing functions as disguised shaming that suppresses creative risk-taking. At a roadside restaurant in Wisconsin, he noticed a dog frozen under a pool table, its jaws locked around a sunken ball it refused to release. He draws the lesson: Letting go of past strategies, biases, and the fear of being found unlovable is essential to creative freedom and must be practiced continually.

MacKenzie closes with an allegorical fantasy. Before birth, God hands each person a pristine canvas and asks them to paint a masterpiece. After birth, society draws lines and numbers on it, implying that painting inside them will produce greatness. MacKenzie describes spending more than 50 years filling in numbered spaces before realizing the result had nothing to do with who he truly was. Today, he wields a wider brush, painting something that reflects what is genuinely inside him. He closes with a direct address: Everyone carries an unrepeatable masterpiece, and if they go to their grave without painting it, no one else can.