Posted by Christopher Stevenson
I just finished Gordon MacKenzie's Orbiting the Giant Hairball. I loved it. (Many thanks to Denise Gabel for sharing it with me.) 
What's to love? MacKenzie, a former employee of Hallmark, lays out his picture of organizations. In short, he says that every element of an organization--history, tradition, policies, procedures, manuals, hierarchies, and so on--is a strand of hair. As the strands combine, they intertwine and tangle. Add enough strands, and they become a hairball.
MacKenzie contends that hairballs, as gross as they sound, aren't necessarily bad. They provide safe harbor and structure to the organization. But if you're not careful, they'll stifle creativity--choke it right out. Gaaaaak.
So what's a creative person to do? Orbit.
MacKenzie is, um, eccentric. He admits that left to his own devices, he would shoot off on a tangent and offer little value to an organization. Big ideas aren't any good if they can't be executed. But, for all the Hallmark bashing MacKenzie does in the book, the organization gave him and other creatives the means to break out of the hairball while maintaining enough structure to execute their ideas. MacKenzie describes it as rocketing out of the tangled mess, but getting stuck in its gravitational pull.
It's a delicate balance and tough to achieve. Hallmark did it by allowing its leaders to develop unique
and creative brands under the Hallmark label. MacKenzie himself worked in a number of different shops that gave him the leeway to expand the brand and make it better and more innovative. Eventually, he was elevated to Hallmark's equivalent of Willy Wonka: a self-stylized creative mystic who helped others launch into orbit. That couldn't have happened if Hallmark hadn't given its big thinkers the latitude to explore.
I can't help but wonder what our industry would be like if all CUs set their own creatives in orbit around the hairball. What if credit unions actively sought solutions beyond "We have totally free checking too"? What if all CUs gave up stock photography in their marketing collateral? What if every CU was run like an entrepreneurial business? Now that'd be cool.
