(really) entrepreneureal

I found out something fascinating today about the U.S. government.  For a lumbering bureaucracy long criticized for its impregnable walls, poor internal communication, and miles and miles of cubicle heaven, there is one office within the fortress that would seem to have a step up on the others: LPA.  Since LPA refers to a current client of mine I certainly can’t disclose the full name here, but if you did a simple Google Search you might be able to guess at which office I have in mind.  For the time being I’ll call it the office-that-shall-not-be-named.

How did I figure out just how powerful this little backwater of the U.S. federal government is?  Well, I have previously referred to an ongoing design project, replete with its hiccups and speedbumps, and was – until this morning – under the impression that the main management team had agreed on a color schema for a core piece of the project (rhymes with “no-go”).  Turns out that the office-that-shall-not-be-named took offense to one of the colors in particular because it did not fit in with the ‘branding guidelines’ of the overall organization.

This in spite of the fact that the explicit mission of the project was to remove it far as possible from the main organization in terms of content, voice, branding, and identity – and the color schema was designed precisely with this in mind.

Of course, there is a certain logic to having LPA oversee branding and marketing materials: because if every project needed its own identity, the main organization would soon look like a horrible Frankenstein of mix-and-match parts, held tenuously together by little more than duct tape and accountants.

Or would that really be the case?  Maybe LPA has authority over visual branding because it’s the easiest (read: only) aspect of the thousands of projects in the ether that it can possibly hope to control.  But does it really make sense to link projects by color scheme?  Does it make sense to link them at all?  Maybe the strength of the organization should come from a core ethos that is translated through every project, regardless of what colors it flies under.

One can dream…