We're always being asked what our logo represents, so we thought we'd explain (but, believing in competition as we do, we thought we'd offer a couple of alternatives -- each one has its own champions internally).
It's From the Story of Sisyphus
The Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was king of Corinth, holds that he saw the god Zeus carry off the beautiful maiden Aegina. Sisyphus then told Aegina's father what he had witnessed. Enraged with Sisyphus, Zeus condemned him to Tartarus, where he was compelled for eternity to roll to the top of a steep hill a stone that always rolled down again.1 The struggle for both progress and freedom is this -- never-ending, difficult, sometimes torturous. Absent inspired action, progress is replaced by atrophy.
It's From the 1939 World's Fair
Dominating the landscape at the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 were a white obelisk and globe -- the Trylon and Perisphere -- that came to symbolize the meaning of the fair. For a nation just coming out of a depression, the fair presented its overall theme -- The World of Tomorrow -- as a very bright one, through ever inventive technology, brilliance of industrial and architectural design, comprehensive planning, scientific progress and the democratic ideology. The fair presented a compelling and cohesive vision of the world that the New Dealers told us they would make -- a world based on an industrial planning model that now needs replacing.2
It's From an Economist's Graph
The idea of progress is for obvious reasons associated with the idea of change, but the two ideas are different. Things never stand still but always move ahead. Yet the world being the way it is, things rarely stay constant as they move, but progress or decay, as in the graph below.
The nature of progress being what it is, you must have a vision and sense of right and wrong to know where you should be heading. From your starting point you must set out to build a better world, or else you accept decay. Thus, you must always be pushing to ensure progress.3
1 Adapted from "Sisyphus," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1993 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1993 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation. 2 Adapted from Jeffrey Hart, "The Seeds of the Third Wave at the Great World's Fair of 1939-40," American Civilization, March 1995.
3 Adapted from Jeffrey A. Eisenach, "The Future of Progress," The Progress & Freedom Foundation, May 1995.
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