Gordon MacKenzie has a peculiar prescription for succeeding in the corporate world: “Orbit the giant hairball.” It’s a message that’s easier to swallow when you consider his 30-year career as a creative revolutionary at Hallmark, the $3.6 billion company known for its creativity.

And it’s one he’s broadcasting beyond the cardmaker’s Kansas City campus: he self-published his book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, in 1996, and Viking will republish it in April. MacKenzie describes the work as “a liberation manual for the chronically entangled and the relentlessly oppressed.” It’s also an apt description of his career at Hallmark.

In the mid-1980s, MacKenzie founded an oasis for creativity — called the Humor Workshop — just outside the walls of Hallmark headquarters. “I wrote a one-page, handwritten description of the department,” MacKenzie recalls. “Without telling my boss, I called his boss, the vice president of the creative division, and we had lunch. By the end of the meal, the VP was telling me, ‘We’ve got to do this!'”

Eventually MacKenzie shifted his orbit and returned to company headquarters, this time with a title of his own invention: Creative Paradox. “My job was to be loyally subversive,” he explains.

 

How Is Your Company Like a Giant Hairball? | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.