Orbiting the Giant Hairball

Orbiting the Giant Hairball A corporate fools guide to surviving with Grace

By Gordon Mackenzie

First the surprise as I go to write this review I look in the front of the book and find out when is printed in 1998. A new trend with me, that of reading older books never before read by me. Once again I find this book topical today as it was when is written. I'm feeling somewhat remorseful that I'm so late to coming to the reading.

David Baldwin has an apt summary, which I'm going to insert here, feeling lazy.

" could have been written yesterday. Its insights are timeless and always relevant.

This small volume is a roadmap for escaping the stifling bureaucracy of corporate

culture and achieving a state of creative achievement by “orbiting” the corporation.

As the author says himself, “hairball” is a disgusting term. But it is an appropriate

term for the mass of policies, procedures, rules, management layers, practices,

conformity, compliance and submission to the status quo that every organization

eventually and invariably becomes.

Every new policy or procedure or rule is a new hair in the hairball. Hairs in

organizations are never removed, they are always added. As the number of hairs

accumulates, so does the mass of the hairball. As in physics, as the mass of a body

increases, so does its gravitational pull.

The corporate organization, the hairball, begins to exert its own corporate gravity.

It is the nature of corporate gravity to suck everything and everyone into its mass,

which translates into corporate normalcy.

Orbiting is operating beyond the bounds of corporate normalcy. The corporate mind

set is to protect and repeat past successes. There is little room in corporate

normalcy for original thinking or primary creativity.

Orbiting is responsible creativity, vigorously exploring and operating beyond the

hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond accepted models, patterns or standards,

all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.

Now a few good quotes from the text itself

“Orbiting is actively engaging in the opportunities and resources provided by the

organization without being sucked into the hairball. To orbit, one must be

continuously mindful of the corporate environment and always conscious of one’s

personal mission to be responsibly creative."

"... If you do follow your bliss you put yourself in a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you and the life you ought to be living is the one you're living "Joseph Campbell

  Need to find a balance being committed to the organization culture at the same time committing to the heart of the personally relevant goals of the organization and how you create your own unique contribution and be more than just a headcount. It takes courage, courage to cross boundaries, courage to admit it idiocy, courage to acknowledge impasse, courage be open up to being rescued.

 Things to do

Groping leave behind your habitual corporate cultures analytic explicit rational concrete goal  oriented linear reality and instead experience spontaneous playful holistic nonlinear creative energy

Freedom versus security

So:skydiving without a parachute is suicide

total freedom is suicide

And: holing up in the closet is vegetating

total security is vegetating

Start near security and move mindfully toward freedom

Coercion is a deterrent to creative a participation

And a workshop without creative participation is not a creative workshop at all but rather an exercise in cultural indoctrination

When we tease others about their performance we hold up a stop sign, and keeps them from sharing risking or growing. before you tease you should pause just a moment look deep inside yourself and see if you can understand your motivation and then reconsider are you  trying to stop that person ,belittle them or lift them up

Be careful of those things which foster isolation isolation brings atrophy decay fading away! engagement brings passion vision invention! Stay engaged

Orville Wright did not have a pilots license don't always wait for permission

Escape from habitual culture must always be temporary if you wish to be permitted back into that culture "yes you can go on and play but you must be home by dinner time"

Compassionate emptiness a state of nonjudgmental receiving- how do I listen?

To create we must let go:

Let go strategies that worked in the past

let go or biases the foundation of our illusions

 Let go of our grievances the root source of our victimhood

Let go of our so often denied fear of being found unlovable

Not rejecting but letting go open up yourself to new possibilities

If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it. Only you!

Where The Blue Begins

Where The Blue Begins
By Christopher Morley copyright 1922
To be honest I'm not sure how this arrived on my reading list. Morely is a fiction writer, an essayist, and  poetry writer of some acclaim but no great notoriety. I thought Brigham recommended it, but I was mistaken, he didn't. Nonetheless I got an inter-library loan of the book and quickly devoured it.



Reviews even say it may have been written as a child book or other types but I found this book to be a good philosophical read: compelling observation on society, family life, professional life and the self discovery of what one truly is searching out of life.

I started reading and gathering quotes but decided not to do that this time but just to read it and enjoy it. And that I did! Not everybody can write a book with the characters all being dogs. And for that matter I don't know if it adds value to the story to be dogs or people, a unique device. Glad I read it. And recommended to you if you like philosophy books with a slant on social commentary. And it seems relevant to me today in 2016 as it was in 1922 when he wrote it.

One quote I'll throw out there is how he describes discovering who his real self was "Another one of those numerous self-inflicted committed suicide that was the right idea to keep sloughing them off throwing overboard the unreal and factitious paring them down until he discovered the  genuine and in alienable creature" . reminds me a bit of CS Lewis's description of Eustice as a dragon peeling off his Dragon self and trying to find his real self inside. The challenge for all of us – discovering our true inner self and raison d'etre..

The Speech Writer

The speechwriter a brief education in politics by Barton Swaim

Had I remembered who Mark Sanford was - South Carolina's governor crazy 'gone missing ' - I might not of read the book.  this guy Brian was the communications officer and speechwriter for him.  I was interested in reading the book in terms of writing and writing styles and sustaining  process as a political speech writer. there are a number of  interesting insights,nothing breakthrough, but a quick easy read.

The governor understood building brand , defining his message and his key message points and in sticking to them. His speech writer bryan built the repertoire of content that reflected his governors positions and thoughts and approaches and style thus building and establishing the governors brand.

The book  was its most interesting upon  reaching its last seven pages where in we found the definition of the kind of men, like the governor who run for office who are politicians: "
Was he at  last pondering the ruin he created I doubt it… Men like him think of achievement and victory not a failure. And when they fail disastrously the first thought is not to repair the damage but to gauge how far it is to the next victory "

"Why do we trust men who have sought and obtained  high office by innumerable acts of vanity and  self will. They serve because they glory and receiving glory. Politicians maybe lauded when the right venerated when they're dead but they should never be trusted.  difference between their public and private persona... I believe you wanted to feel a deeper remorse he looked inside and it wasn't there all he found was more of himself... Politicians gain power by convincing us that they are wise and trustworthy... The claimant attention or his highest name is is they are every determine politicians I need to praise the finding the seriousness with people take the remarks gaze of the audience the way room falls silent when enters
. He May have good desires it's a desire it's not what drives him. What drives them is the thirst for glory. The public good as he understands it is a means to that end.


Contrasting to King Benjamin 

Mosiah 29:6 ccf
35 And he also unfolded unto them all the disadvantages they labored under, by having an unrighteous king to rule over them;

36 Yea, all his iniquities and abominations, and all the wars, and contentions, and bloodshed, and the stealing, and the plundering, and the committing of whoredoms, and all manner of iniquities which cannot be enumerated--telling them that these things ought not to be, that they were expressly repugnant to the commandments of God.


Mosiah 2
s suffered by the hand of the Lord that I should be a ruler and a king over this people; and have been kept and preserved by his matchless power, to serve you with all the might, mind and strength which the Lord hath granted unto me.

12 I say unto you that as I have been suffered to spend my days in your service, even up to this time, and have not sought gold nor silver nor any manner of riches of m
16 Behold, I say unto you that because I said unto you that I had spent my days in your service, I do not desire to boast, for I have only been in the service of God.

17 And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.
16 Behold, I say unto you that because I said unto you that I had spent my days in your service, I do not desire to boast, for I have only been in the service of God.

17 And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God


Not lipservice but that he's actually serving God. The –Measure of how people should live and how he should govern. Where is their heart where is their reward! 


Sent from tim wilson

Inside The Magic Shop

I've been trying to improve the quality of my meditation and so after seeing his TED TALK, decided to read his book. An interesting personal journey of his and some insights.
Into The magic shop

By James r doty

Power of intention to change everything 

Trick #1:
Relaxing the Body

http://intothemagicshop.com/sites/default/files/ITMS_Relaxing_the_Body-1.mp3

Trick #2:
Taming the Mind

http://intothemagicshop.com/sites/default/files/ITMS_Taming_the_Mind.mp3Trick #3:

Opening the Heart

http://intothemagicshop.com/sites/default/files/ITMS_Opening_the_Heart.mp3

 The power of compassion that will heal our wounds and the hearts of those around us 

Trick #4:

Clarifying Your Intent

http://intothemagicshop.com/sites/default/files/ITMS_Clarity_of_Intent.mp3
 

Alphabet of the heart 

Atonement baptism charity  

divine nature 

eternity

Forgiveness 

gratitude 

humility 

inspiration 

Jesus 

kindness 

love

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald’s ‘H Is for Hawk’

New York Times review states

"The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father’s sudden death. She retreats from the human world. She’s a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. Bigger, “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier,” she says, than other hawks they are sometimes confused with."

The book is also a history and psyco analysis of t.h.white, how to raise a falcon, and her dealing with death, and she writes lovely prose. I enjoyed her writing first and then I became involved with the story.

I is remind him in the month book where she describes looking for the world through to buy two frame to capture it all and McDonald describes her father's approach to photography

"look through the viewfinder. Stops you being involved. Stops you being scared. You No longer possess a body to fall or fail; all that exist is a square and finally groundglass and the world seen through it,"

That allows you to be a watcher in being a watcher you can learn who you are and what you can be.

In dealing with her father's death she thought that to heal her hurt she need in the flee to the wild and that what you need to do was to turn to people and for holding other human hands wildness is not a panacea for the human soul too much in the air could corrode it  to nothing.

She cautions  against being a tourist in the world as opposed to been involved in the world and isolation can bring further isolation. That community brings healing: it is the place to heal a broken heart. " I must fight  always against  forgetting" truly a gospel axiom of telling us we need to remember !

You have to be patient. If there is something you want very much, you just have to be patient and wait.

On immunity an inoculation By Eola Biss

A well crafted , well thought out book, that reads almost like a collection of essays. She , while dealing with her own doubts , uncovers part of why people--privileged, educated people, no less--choose not to vaccinate their children, disregarding scientific evidence and social responsibility. 

She hooked me with her first metaphor of Achilles , and kept me from definition to definition. 

Definitely on the 'should read 'list . The following our conversation starters from her book:

Immunity is a myth the story suggest and no mortal can ever be made invulnerable. 

A trust – in the sense of valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong – captures more or less my understanding of what it is to have a child.

Heard immunity – thinking not in terms of how it affects a single body but also in terms of how it affects the collective body with community mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination. Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.

Their primary concern in other words was with people like them- risk groups. Vaccination works by listing the majority in the protection of the minority.

When we encounter information that contradicts our believes we tend to doubt the information not ourselves.

Metaphors of alternate medicine address our base anxieties when we feel bad we want something unambiguously good.

The purpose of heroic medicine was not so much to heal the patient as it was to produce a measurable and ideally dramatic effect for which the patient could be billed.

Refusing immunity the privilege 1% are sheltered from risk when they draw resources from the other 99%.

Paternalism is interference with the liberty of another for the purpose of promoting some good preventing some harm. Not always necessarily a bad thing.

The term conscientious objector, now associated primarily with war, originally referred to those who refused vaccination.

Think about the conscience is an inner voice to keep your actions in line with publicly defendable moral standards (which may shown the lack of conscience in today's society)

Stale metaphors reproduce stale thinking mixed metaphors confuse.

It Is essential to motherhood – we must live the questions our children raise for us.

Jean-Paul Sartre said "freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."

Community is shared space - a garden we tend together

The joy of falling into books

Brigham sent me this delightful link to an essay by Brian Doyle , Here

My dad would have enjoyed.

I am that rare man who thinks he can pinpoint the moments in which he fell in love with books, and the way that stories printed on good paper, sometimes with delicious accompanying artwork, can awake something in a child that he or she did not know was there, but was there, hibernating, patiently impatient, and then bursting forth with what we could call glee, and delight, and excitement, and passion, and hunger; for once you are thrilled by books, you realize with dawning amazement and anticipation that you are lucky and doomed both—lucky that the world is filled with more wonderful books than you can read in even three lifetimes, and doomed because you will certainly miss thousands of wonderful books even if you read thriftily, assiduously, avidly, ravenously.

But away you go anyway, one book leading to a second to a seventh to a hundredth; you emerge laughing and sighing from The Wind in the Willows and you read every other book about animals that you can find; you read one Sherlock Holmes story and you read the rest, and then venture deep into the wilderness of the rest of Conan Doyle, discovering the high hilarity of Brigadier Gerard and the haunted mania of his spiritualist works; you read one Chip Hilton sports book and you read every other book about sports you can find. The life of Lincoln somehow leads to Bobby Orr and Madame Curie; the gemlike brilliance of Chekhov leads to Frank O’Connor and Ray Bradbury; Li Po leads to Lee Child to Harper Lee, and on and on and on.

I do remember reading The Wind in the Willows, and the Chip Hilton novels, and Tom Swift and Tintin and the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, but it is a book I read when I was perhaps 10 years old that rises to memory this morning, as the book that tipped me over into some subtle but telling pleasure that has not only fed 50 years of reading but 40 years of writing, 40 years of trying to put thoughts and feelings and intimations into words and sentences and paragraphs and passages, trying to make sensations into stories, trying to articulate that which cannot be explained or understood, but which can most certainly be felt, and, if the writer works hard enough, perhaps shared.

It was Christopher Morley’s Where the Blue Begins, the quiet blue cloth first edition, 1922, with drawings and color plates by the inimitable Arthur Rackham. I was ill and abed, as I recall; I have the faintest memory that it was late summer, hot and windy outside, and dense and silent inside the house; and I picked up the book, and began to read, and for the first time that I remember I was in the story; I had been sucked into it in all my parts, so that after an hour or so, when my mother came to check on me, I was genuinely startled to see her, and to slowly recognize my crowded cheerful bedroom, for I had been strolling along with Mr. Gissing for quite some time, thick as thieves, chasing after that mysterious faraway most alluring blue.

This has happened many times since then, and many is the book in which I plunged so deeply and thoroughly that when I finished I was discombobulated to find myself in a chair, or bed, or library nook, when just a moment before I had been at sea with Captain Aubrey, or on the tundra with Barry Lopez, or deep in the jungle with Joseph Conrad whispering conspiratorially in my ear; and I have been blessed enough as a writer to several times receive letters from readers startled and displeased when a book of mine ended, and there was nothing after the last sentence but a blank page, as trackless and remote as a Pole. One reader wrote to me recently to actively complain that a book of mine had ended, and she wished to know, by return mail if possible, what had happened next to the people in the book, whom she had come to like very much, with all their flaws. I wrote back carefully, to say I was not privy as yet to what happened next, though perhaps that news would arrive in its own time; and I continue to think that I could not possibly receive a greater compliment than that, though it was offered with a certain vinegar. She had been lured irresistibly into a story, just as I had been so many times, and you, too; do we celebrate that subtle delight as much as we should? Do we salute and honor the way that books so quietly and gracefully become countries and ships and planets, the way they are extraordinary and graceful time machines, the way they hook billions of children on the joy of narrative and imagination? We do not, I think; we take the gift of books and stories a little for granted, because the miracle is so subtle; but pause for a moment yourself, this morning, and think about the books you fell into too, as a child, and when you were interrupted, or when you finished, there was that odd discombobulatory instant when you were not quite sure where you were. A wonderful instant, isn’t it? Never forget.

The Wright Brothers

The Wright brothers 

by David McCullough

One review cited: 

Mechanical invention is close to a religious calling in this reverent biography of the pioneers of heavier-than-air flight by Pulitzer-winning historian McCullough
And the nytimes opined
. Or because the Wrights’ asceticism and single-mindedness sound so uncomplicatedly heroic.

Fairly straightforward non pulsing book interesting read not a compelling read.  The history is amazing - the focus, the talent, the application of the men .  the writing not so much-perhaps in my naivety perhaps i miss the skill of his writing that his writing doesn't get in the way of the story it's a plain simple story plain simple facts, plain and simple yet incredible men. 

All The Light We Cannot See

‘All the Light We Cannot See,’ by Anthony Doerr

This book is full of the rich sentences and structure which so delight me in reading. E.g.

"To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in the shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marches two miles away ... she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth's crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides."

Never a big fan of jumping back and forth between years to weave the fabric of a story; here Doerr does it without bugging to much, I think in part it is by his structure of keeping chapters short, still don't like the technique.  NPR's summation - A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.

The essence of the story is the crossroads built in the experiences of " Marie-Laure (who)grows up (blind) beloved and fortunate; Werner’s life is more grim. He is close to his sister, Jutta, but both are consigned to an orphanage after their father is crushed in a coal mine. For Werner, there truly seems to be no future: The German government decrees that when boys from his region reach their midteens, they must go to work in the mines. But Werner is also a prodigy. Just as Marie-Laure’s father has a genius for creating locks and models, Werner has a way with electrical circuits. He builds a shortwave radio that holds the key to his future." As Germany heads into then deeply emerges itself and France in WWII.

The story is at once compelling  as the author shares the choices his characters make and on the souls that have been lost, both living and dead. At once making the story a quick and driving read - but similarly the sadness of those losses and incredible evil of war. A well written book, which covers war, can not but help but bring a degree of sorrow to me and gratitude that i have not personally  gone to war;  and even more grateful for those who have on my behalf. Even more tragic is the snares an evil world lays for the young teenage protagonists. How society , with its war machine dehumanizes the young Werner ; and survival isn't the clear victory we imagine.

not interested to dive into the title. But I like it on several levels.

Mr penumbras 24- hour book store

Mr. penumbras 24 hour bookstore 

by Reuben Sloan

A delightful book in many ways
I kept finding myself googling stuff to see if it's real
The one most intriguing ,which I have no answer for , is there, are there , repositories like the cave in nyc. I guess there is at least three 1) wherever the gold plates are and 2) where the urim and thumin are now -figuring the church has in possession 3) the Vatican archives. You got a bet there are more- you ever hear of others? Brigham noted The book cavern tended to remind him of the forgotten book library of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's

My copy of the book came from the library. The library is still a great source of discovery and learning. The learning from penumbra well here they are:

        - All the secrets in the world worth knowing her hiding in plain sight.

        -  There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.

        - It's not easy to imagine the year 3012 but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try

         - Your life must be an open city with all sorts of ways to wander in

Any how , needed a good read - thanks to Brigham  for recommending it, is he so often does. 

And so the memory of this book will fade The way all books fade  in your mind but remember this to still look for the right book and exact right time to read it.