Business Book Club Handouts for Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. Presented by The Meyvn Group July 21, 2009

1. Orbiting the Giant Hairball A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace July 21, 2009

2. About Gordon MacKenzie Many people might have considered the late Gordon MacKenzie a renaissance man. He was a metal sculptor, management consultant, keynote speaker, author, artist and poet. In the 1950’s MacKenzie flunked out of the University of British Columbia before landing a job as a cartoonist and writer for the Vancouver Sun. MacKenzie joined Hallmark in 1961 and worked there exactly 30 years – to the day. Orbiting the Giant Hairball follows MacKenzie’s career at Hallmark where he transitioned from individual contributor to creating a job conducting creativity seminars to his self-styled position of Creative Paradox. MacKenzie said that during “those 30 years, there was not a day when I was not subject to the inexorable pull of corporate tugging me toward the tangle of the hairball where the ghosts of past successes outvoted original thinking.“ Hallmark hired MacKenzie to create and he decided the best way to that was to connect people to the emergent, abnormal and unusual in order to foster change and innovation throughout the organization. Orbiting the Giant Hairball may be more than a decade old but it is far from dated. If anything – it is even more valuable in today’s turbulent environment.