OK, For Real: The True Story of The Kraut
So you’re saying you don’t believe a can of kraut is infinite?
The Real Story of Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans:
Some ideas are so bad that you have two choices: hide them, or own them so tenaciously that they seem brilliant. At CentreSource, we believe that interactive can be used to create innovative new value in almost ANYTHING, so we’re going with “tenacity = brilliance” on this one.
In 2008, CentreSource was the leading sponsor of Nashville’s Barcamp – an “un-convention” for our growing interactive community. We created a great program for the day, designed some fun interactive games, and volunteered ourselves as MCs for what was a great day of speaking, learning, and networking.
We forgot one thing, though, until the last minute: prizes for our interactive games.
Nicholas Holland, ever enterprising, winged it. Two cans of spraypaint and two cans of canned food later and the prizes were born: Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans.
The Silvery Beans, given first, elicited confusion and mild amusement from the audience. Luckily, the winner of The Golden Kraut understood the honor he had earned, and announced his excitement by running through the aisles like a man possessed. He couldn’t enunciate the excitement he felt – instead, he showed his enthusiasm by creating an online avatar of the Kraut.
Since then, the Golden Kraut and the Silvery Beans have come to represent more to our firm. It’s our method of awarding a job well done and proving that incentive can come from, well, anything – as long as you believe you’ve earned it.
We give one Golden Kraut and one Silvery Beans each month to the most deserving members of our team. We have a system internally to nominate each other – and we’ve found that it helps us rely on each other, reward each other openly for outstanding performance, and collaborate to develop Kraut-worthy ideas.
And because CentreSource believes in Nashville’s amazing interactive and web community, we award one Golden Kraut and one Silvery Beans at each of our monthly Interactive Mixers. These trophies go to those individuals who display their Krautnitude proudly in our interactive games – which we’ve designed to bring out a more closely-knit community in our great city.
NOTE: If you are the first winners of Golden Kraut and Silvery Beans at Nashville Barcamp 2008, contact us – we want to enter you into the Kraut Winners directory!
