Hanging loose in a bureaucracy - Hallmark Cards creativity consultant Gordon MacKenzie - interview

Communication World, August, 1991 by John Gerstner

And why not? What other employee in the corporate US has a den instead of an office, a room that is a melange of art, antiques, sculpture, cartoons and bric-a-brac, including a roll-top desk, drawing table and a wonderfully painted chair with wings hanging from the ceiling? Who else could seriously describe their job as, "inviting fellow employees to come out on the thin ice with me." Who else has the job title creative paradox?"

Gordon MacKenzie certainly is one. As the only official creative paradox at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Mo., he is also perhaps the only creativity consultant in the US who is working to subvert corporate stultification from the inside. His title may be an inside joke, but it is a serious one.

"Large organizations are like giant hairballs," he says, with a characteristic twinkle. Every decision adds another hair. There is existence but no life in a hairball. You have to expend creative energy to avoid getting all tangled up."

When MacKenzie isn't stirring up corporate creativity at Hallmark, he's out on the lecture circuit, using overything from mirth to meditation to put audiences as large as several hundred people into a kind of surreal, creative trance.

After which he asks the audience to write a poem based on a randomly chosen noun and adjective. The brave ones volunteer to read their creations aloud. Many of the Poems are amazingly heartfelt and moving.

"Everyone has a masterpiece within him from birth," says MacKenzie afterward. \Wen we are young, society draws pale blue lines, as if your life were a paint-by-numbers kit. The message is: If you stay in the lines your life will be a masterpiece. That's a lie. You have to constantly battle to be nobody but yourself. If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted."

MacKenzie is a small man prone to big, hearty laughs, especially after similarly deep and insightful digressions. ("I'm really babbling now," he chides himself.) He also has the somewhat disconcerting habit of occasionally blowing air as he speaks. "I do it to stay in touch and keep from shutting down," he says.

Interviewed at Hallmark, in what he insists on calling mY rOOm," MacKenzie dances around the subject of corporate creativity like a dervish ... reading a poem from "The Awakened Eye" by Frederik Frank ... talking freely about his recOvery from alcoholism ... confiding that it took him 20 years to find the courage to do a pirouette in the hallowed halls of Hallmark,

MacKenzie believes in letting go, having fun, enjoying the "ecstasy of living." As if to prove the point, he happily and without hesitation agreed to pose for the camera while wading in the company reflecting pool.

i wish I had your job," a fellow employee teased as MacKenzie was testing the corporate waters. MacKenzie just flashed a huge grin.

JG: Why are most corporate environments so sterile, so corporate? GM: My guess is it's control. Large organizations feel a deep need to control, and that extends to the physical environment.

JG: Do you think this desire to control is sinister?

GM: No, I think it's just a responsibility to the customer and to shareholders to try and deliver the best possible product. To do that entails a certain need for predictability, and to get that one is often drawn into a need for over, controlling the situation. I understand creativity to be a manifestation of the unconscious. We can't know ahead of time what's going to come up. It seems to me the way around this is to let creativity flow and pick through it to find the things that can be exploited for positive gain. We tend not to do that.

JG: Why?

GM: Our society is threatened by people having too much access to that limitless creativity within our unconscious, because it might raise uncomfortable questions and there is stuff in there that looks insane. Therefore, society discourages creativity in an incredible variety of ways.

JG: This must be a very unusual corporation.

GM: Remarkable.

JG: How do you mesh with the accountants at Hallmark?

GM: I don't think we understand each other. I think a lot of us are reluctant to understand each other. So we mesh with a lack of mutual understanding to a certain degree.

JG: Healthy misunderstanding?

GM: Tolerance. Knowing at some level that we need each other, but wishing that we didn't. (Laugh.)

JG: Tell me about your job at Hallmark. Creative paradox?

GM: I don't have a job description. I'm doing it right now. My job is to put myself out in front of you or whoever and risk to grow. Really to risk and stretch and walk out on some thin ice and say, "I wonder if I can stand here."

I try to do this with workshops and brainstorming sessions where I try to offer some non-ordinary ways for people to get at the limitless resources that they have inside of them. Creativity, more than anything else, is gaining access to what we already have.

JG: Do you think there is a penalty for exhibiting creativity as you do inside a corporation?

GM: Could we say "price" instead of "penalty?" Yes, there's a price, but there's a price for everything. It comes down to what each of us as individuals will honor. How much courage will we find to honor the things that we cherish? If I cherish personal freedom, but I don't have the courage to pay the price of having that freedom ... because there will be a price for it ... then I will live in a kind of frustration, a wimpy world that longs for the freedom but isn't willing to suffer the pain to get it. We can end up wishing our life away. If we can find the courage to confront an issue that is causing chronic dull pain, we can get through and beyond it.