ddubb industries

orbiting the giant hairball

March 20th, 2006 creative, literary

a book by Gordon MacKenzie I found in a Christianity Today Article sent to me by Mike Swann:

Imagine a serene pasture where a dairy cow is quietly eating grass, chewing her cud, and swishing her tail.

Outside the fence stands a rotund gentleman in a $700, powder-blue, pinstripe suit. This gentleman is livid that the cow is not working hard. He doesn’t understand that whatever milk the cow produces when placed on the milking machine is directly related to the time the cow spends out in the field—seemingly idle, but, in fact, performing the alchemy of transforming grass into milk.

It’s quiet time essential to profound creativity.

From Amazon:

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.