National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis has released the agency's logo for its centennial in 2016, one that uses the agency's familiar arrowhead for the zero in 2016.
The logo was unveiled Wednesday to Park Service employees during a "webchat" the director had with his workforce. Parks are being encouraged to use the logo on Monday in celebration of the Park Service's 98th birthday. While the image released Wednesday contained the Twitter hashtag symbol #nationalparks, that hashtag is not a permanent part of the centennial logo, but rather to remind park staff to use the hashtag Monday when they tweet about the centennial.
The centennial logo, which features a light-green arrowhead and matching green lettering for the word "centennial," comes just five months after the Park Service and the National Park Foundation jointly released logos for the campaign leading up to the centennial. Those logos were intended to build public enthusiasm toward the centennial.
Park Service officials were not immediately available Thursday morning to say why the new logo was released so quickly after the earlier one.
Director Jarvis and staff employees celebrated the release of the new logo on Wednesday/NPS
When the centennial campaign logos were released in March, they drew heavy criticism for their empty arrowheads, though Park Service and Foundation officials were quick to point out that the logos were not replacing the traditional Park Service arrowhead that pictures a sequoia tree, mountains, and a bison, but simply were designed to promote the centennial.
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Comments
Eehhhhhhhhhhhhh . . . . Blech.
Almost as bad as Richard Nixon's "modernization" of the NPS and Interior emblems and our badges.
Super double BLECH. Unbelievably uncreative. Fail.
This is why design by committee does not work. I'm sure someone on the design team said "Kim Kardashian would love this!" and "it needs more fonts."
An empty arrowhead does seem a rather apt logo for our NPS management that ranks in the bottom sixth of federal employee satisfaction surveys and a bureaucracy that absorbs half the annual appropriation before it ever reaches the actual parks.
ditto that, tahoma. An ugly, empty arrowhead does seem reflective of the agency bureaucrats these days. Wonder how much they spent in taxpayer money to come up with such a loser.
An AppropriateTime to Give Credit to Dr. Lawrence Peter for predicitng our Gross Disappointment in the 2016 NPS Centennial Logo promoted by high-ranking NPS Officials devoid of creative imaginations !... sigh...Amen !
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Peter_Principle.html
The Peter Principle is the principle that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence".
It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous treatise which also introduced the "salutary science of hierarchiology", "inadvertently founded" by Peter. It holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. This principle can be modelled and has theoretical validity for simulations.[1] Peter's Corollary states that "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties" and adds that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence". Managing upward is the concept of a subordinate finding ways to subtly "manage" superiors in order to limit the damage that they end up doing.
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Overview
The Peter Principle is a special case of a ubiquitous observation: anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. This is "The Generalized Peter Principle". It was observed by Dr. William R. Corcoran in his work on corrective action programs at nuclear power plants. He observed it applied to hardware, e.g., vacuum cleaners as aspirators, and administrative devices such as the "Safety Evaluations" used for managing change. There is much temptation to use what has worked before, even when it may exceed its effective scope. Dr. Peter observed this about humans.
In an organizational structure, the Peter Principle's practical application allows assessment of the potential of an employee for a promotion based on performance in the current job; i.e., members of a hierarchical organization eventually are promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to incompetence. That level is the employee's "level of incompetence" where the employee has no chance of further promotion, thus reaching their career's ceiling in an organization.
The employee's incompetence is not necessarily exposed as a result of the higher-ranking position being more difficult — simply, that job is different from the job in which the employee previously excelled, and thus requires different work skills, which the employee may not possess. For example, a factory worker's excellence in their job can earn them promotion to manager, at which point the skills that earned them their promotion no longer apply to their job.
What is that green thing in the middle of the logo? How many people will be able to guess the right answer? It is hard not to despair.
Well, it's nothing to write home about, but it's better than a blind old owl.