Orbiting the Giant Hairball: Learning to Manage Creative People

Quite a few years ago, someone shared a remarkable book with me. Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie changed my life and my view of both managing creative people and what it means to be a creative person.  I've made it a practice to go on line about once a year and buy a few copies of the book so I have a supply to give away or circulate among colleagues.

MacKenzie worked many years for Hallmark Cards.  As an artist who later helped to manage artists, he became well aware of the challenges associated with managing "Creatives".  The title of the book refers to organizations or corporations that have to have many rules or hairs that hold them together.  A large corporation might be considered to be a Hairball.

If left to their own devices, artists will create remarkable things.  If allowed to create without constraint, their value to the organization may be limited.  If kept close to the corporation, they will be sucked into the hairball and lose their creative spark.

Managing "Creatives" requires putting them into an orbit that allows them to operate just outside of the gravitational pull of the Hairball and not so far away that their creations have no relevance or connection to the Corporation.

Let's all be reminded that it takes more to manage creative people than it does to manage mere mortals.