Surviving Ecclesiological Culture   A Review of Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace Gordon MacKenzie (©1996, Viking, New York, NY, ISBN: 0-670-87983-5)

 

The late Gordon MacKenzie held the title of “Creative Paradox” during his tenure at Hallmark Cards and his book lives up to that title. Even though the book is nearing a decade in age, it is far from dated. If anything it is more appropriate today than it was in the 1990’s. The first thing one notices when picking up this book is that it is far from the ordinary fare of inane corporate parables, fables and nostrums. It looks less like a business book and more like a doodle pad that has some text added to it to give it weight. Unexpectedly, the real weight of the book comes from the doodles, the illustrations, the meanderings and sketches that populate the pages. If the medium is the message, then MacKenzie has transported us into a wondrous world of thinking outside the book.

 

The message of the book is that creativity is the cure for whatever ails us in the corporate cosmos. He says in the third chapter, “Hairball is policy, procedure, conformity, compliance, rigidity and submission to status quo, while Orbiting is originality, rules-breaking, non-conformity, experimentation, and innovation.” This sounds pretty radical when applied to a church setting where conformity and compliance are valued as virtues and non-conformity and innovation represent dangerous compromise with the world. The message we tend to miss from the Gospels, is that Jesus was exactly the kind of non-conformist, innovative maverick the religious establishment of His day deplored. If our goal is to be more like Christ than conformity and rigidity should be the anathemas, not originality and experimentation.

 

MacKenzie spends the rest of the book describing how genius, talent and creativity are systematically stifled in corporations and how to overcome the “hairball” tendencies to get tangled in them. All of his lessons apply to church with more force than they do in corporate America. He charts a path for how to innovate without necessarily upsetting the apple cart. With chapter titles like “Containers Contain” and “Pool Hall Dog” he grabs readers’ attention and directs them into spontaneous creativity. Nearly every page has pictures, illustrations, and doodles in the margins which reinforces the core message of releasing creativity. In an era where entropic expression has reduced a lot of church to uniform listlessness, MacKenzie shows us how to tap into our inner genius to revitalize our homes, our workplaces and our churches. This is no how-to book but an inspirational tome that demonstrates as well as describes how to chart a future of creative paradox.

 

by Rick Presley