Some of you are saying “What does that title mean?” It’s a perfectly reasonable question and the sort of response that linear, brain-bound, skeptical guys like me tend to have when presented with something we don’t immediately understand. My wife, on the other hand, would say “What a great title!” and read on with curiosity and boundless inquisitiveness. That’s because my wife is orbital. It’s no coincidence that she is more creative than I am.

How we initially react to new ideas, new challenges, or new opportunities is a fairly accurate mirror of how much creativity we are likely to apply to the problems they present. Think of work situations in which you commonly bump up against the boundaries of your creative abilities, like writing an integrated set of applications, for example. Linear thinking, you may discover, is powerful but limited. It is good for coding a program, not as useful for designing a complex system. Good for writing a policy or procedure, poor for understanding when to change it. Good for creating order, not so good for detecting unsuspected order inside the chaos. Rich in logic, poor in logical leaps.

Limited as we are, linear thinkers disdain challenges to our epistemology. Excessive inquisitiveness by nonlinear people is considered annoying by linear beings, especially when it dares to question our well-ordered beliefs. We dismiss such probing as irrational, naive, or better yet, absurd.

Disdain notwithstanding, a more functional reaction need not be a Pollyannaish search for the pony in the manure. Given manure—a cargo that seems to arrive in the workplace with some regularity—a more positive response would engage sufficient imagination to discover that dung can be useful as both fuel and fertilizer. Creativity is nurtured by bold response, although, in business, boldness is characteristically welcome only in entrepreneurial circles. The cautious “What does that mean?” is the more common approach in established corporate domains “where the ghosts of past successes outvote original thinking.”

That insightful line was penned by writer and creative gadfly Gordon MacKenzie, who answers the title questions and much more in a delightful and engaging book called, not by coincidence, Orbiting the Giant Hairball.

The hairball under discussion is the corporation—or more accurately, the patterns of conformity and expected behaviors learned through decades of success and failure that create, in MacKenzie’s words, “a Gordian knot of Corporate Normalcy.”

Every new policy, every new procedure is another hair in the hairball. Hairs are only added, he notes, never removed. And the only way to survive without getting permanently entangled, says MacKenzie, is to orbit the mess from afar, finding your own creative balance to “counteract the pull of Corporate Gravity.” He should know. He worked for Hallmark Cards for 30 years. He was hired to “create,” and he nobly fought for three decades the institutional restrictions designed to funnel him toward sameness. If you’ve ever seen two classic Hallmark cards, you understand his resistance. Gradually, through gentle and persistent rebelliousness, he evolved into a “self-styled corporate holy man” who created new lines of product and whose last job title was Creative Paradox, a position from which he assisted others to liberate their own creativity.

The assault on creativity, according to MacKenzie, begins quite early in life, and he uses a compelling story to illustrate his point. For several years, MacKenzie visited grammar schools, bringing with him an assortment of metal sculptures to share with the students. He always began his presentations by acknowledging the students for the fine art work displayed in their classroom. He told them that since he was an artist, seeing the beautiful colors and shapes they created made him feel right at home because he realized there must be other artists here, too. Then he would ask the children, “How many artists are there in the room? Would you please raise your hands.”

The response, he said, never varied. In the first grade, the entire class raised their hands and waved them enthusiastically claiming their artistic talent. But by the time the students reached second grade, only half raised their hands, and no one was waving. By the third grade, only one third of the kids raised hesitant, self-conscious hands.

The withering of inventiveness supports educator Neil Postman’s contention that “children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.” MacKenzie concluded that every school he visited was inadvertently “participating in the suppression of creative genius.” Corporations, he believes, continue this practice by craving the fruits of creativity but rewarding mostly conformity.

There is a corporate “devotion to herd wisdom,” MacKenzie writes, that tempts people to repeat the safe and successful behaviors of the past. Risk, the earnest money of creativity and therefore the fountainhead of corporate continuity, is adroitly avoided. Like scarce capital, it is reluctantly invested, given the high cost of failure, which can include embarrassment, humiliation, loss of stature and, ultimately, loss of job.

In one fashion or another, explicitly or implicitly, employees are taught the five cornerstones of corporate success and promotability—linear lessons all, guaranteed to muffle creativity:

1. Work hard. MacKenzie recounts a speaking engagement at a conference held by a large computer company. (I asked him, and he swears it wasn’t IBM. “But it could have been,” he said.) He was listening to the woman responsible for organizing the conference thank those who had helped her. “You gave so much; you really made my job easy,” she acknowledged. Her remark, MacKenzie recalled, was rewarded with heckling. MacKenzie concluded that “having an easy job was taboo in this corporate culture.” When a corporation values only those who are “heroically overworked,” he said, the message it sends its employees is this: “Make your job difficult, stretch yourself thin, stress yourself out, and eventually you, too, may be honored with executive approval.” Mandatory exhaustion makes a poor companion to the creative process.

2. Follow the rules. Some rules are useful and necessary, but a slavish devotion to coloring only within the lines limits results to the borders prescribed by custom and policy. Rules are the bars on the cage. Depending on the size and comfort of that cage, a compelling argument can be made for inhabiting either side of the enclosure. MacKenzie recounts a cartoon in which Garfield bursts into a pet store, announces himself to be a freedom fighter, throws open the cage doors and declares, “You’re free! You’re free!” The animals don’t move, frightened by the possibility of the unknown. Ever adaptable, Garfield

slams the doors shut, yelling, “You’re secure! You’re secure!” The most useful rules are those that make it safe to venture out of the cage.

3. Find the right answer. Tricky, if the right answer lies outside the rules, and also limiting because we tend to stop looking once we have found it. That is, we typically stop searching for other possibilities once we’ve discovered a workable solution. But the first solution isn’t always the best. Roger von Oech, a former database and communications specialist with IBM, wrote his own little book on creativity called A Whack on the Side of the Head. In it, he suggests “looking for the second right answer.” MacKenzie would add, why stop there?

4. Don’t make a mistake or look foolish. There is a way that people, men in particular, relate to one another that is based on fear and the need for control. It is a form of banter, often barbed and usually sarcastic. Those who practice it have a quick wit and a fast tongue and often a smug disregard for the feelings of others. To MacKenzie, “Teasing is a disguised form of shaming.” It is used, he says, “to blunt the power of those countless people [by whom we feel] threatened.” When teasing occurs in response to a mistake, it is a clear message to “stop risking, stop growing, stop living, because when you finally stop living, you will no longer be a threat to me.” It is a rare spirit who experiences public shaming and then chooses to risk anew.

5. Time spent not working is time wasted. Corporations yearn for the products of the creative process, but have little patience with the process itself. MacKenzie notes that the grand creative flourish usually comes in the aftermath of a lot of thinking, or playing, or doodling, or some such other nonbillable activity. What appears nonproductive may simply be a part of a person’s creative journey. It is, MacKenzie warns, a necessary part of the process, and pressuring employees to create faster makes about as much sense as threatening cows to produce milk more quickly.

Creativity is part gamble, and risk is by nature, well, risky. But failure can be minimized and the prospect of success greatly amplified by full commitment. Commitment is the source of our excitement. It is difficult to generate much energy for a new project—or life for that matter—when it is fueled by partial commitment. Imagine being committed to jumping only 90 percent of the way across the Grand Canyon. Holding back produces predictable results. When the Spanish explorer Cortez landed in Veracruz, the first thing he did was burn his ships. He wanted his men fully committed to surviving in the New World, not tied to the safety of retreat at the first sign of hardship.

There is, MacKenzie writes, “a sad state of lost juiciness echoed in the world of business. A monomania for tough-minded, cold-blooded competitive correctness has bred the spiritual sensuousness out of most of our human enterprises. That leaves us with a reality of synthetic personas and pasteboard passions, an epidemic of barren careers and a wasteland of workplaces devoid of flavor.” Maybe it’s time to burn the ships.

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