Friday, May 25, 2007

Commemorative T-Shirt!

Just in time for Memorial Day, my colleagues surprised me with a commemorative T-shirt -- complete with a catchy logo ...


... and tour dates!



It was so sweet of them, and I have to say it made me feel kind of rock-star-cool. Come to think of it, I don't know what happened to all of my concert t-shirts from college. Did I throw them away? Give them to the poor? Make them into dish rags?

I literally have only one t-shirt left from college, and it has been worn super-thin and super-soft from repeated washings. It was a t-shirt for our student organization, known as SUPC. I remember "helping" choose the logo for that t-shirt. My roommate was in charge of the SUPC Publicity & Promotions committee that year (I was in charge of the SUPC Glass Onion Concerts committee), and she came back one evening with proposed new logo designs for the overall organization. She showed me "our new logo" (i.e., the one her committee had liked the best and thus decided to inflict on all of SUPC). I panned it; it looked too much like a turkey. And there was certainly nothing wrong with our existing logo, so why change it? She showed me the runners-up. Those were awful, too. So we spent a few hours trying to design and re-design the SUPC logo. Then, around 1 or 2 a.m., I came back to her original proposal, and decided I liked that one best, in fact, even better than the "old" logo.

There's a lesson or two in here somewhere -- about getting people's buy-in and letting them feel like they're a part of the process rather than arrogantly imposing new ideas upon them from above -- and also about knee-jerk rejection of the novel and unfamiliar without attempting to understand or appreciate where it is coming from. Moreover, those hours were not wasted; I would have kicked up a fuss at the SUPC Executive Committee meeting and would probably have managed to derail the new logo, if she hadn't gotten my buy-in in advance. Instead she had an ally and smooth sailing....

2 comments:

Runner NYC said...

That's great! You've really made an impression on your colleagues!

LeesMyth said...

No doubt! But they are also super-nice, thoughtful people. It was really sweet of them to do this.