The Building Blocks of Great Work

O.C. Tanner is not what it used to be.

Founded in 1927 as a jewelry company in Utah by Obert C. Tanner, its reputation for world class craftsmanship won it the honor of producing the gold and silver medals for the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. As it did during the Summer Games fifteen years ago, today O.C. Tanner focuses on inspiring and rewarding others’ great work.

“Celebrating great work inspires people to invent, to create, to discover,” the company says. “And when people are inspired, companies grow.” One of its executives, David Sturt, even wrote a New York Times bestselling book called Great Work.

Great companies have always rewarded their employees for producing great work, and O.C. Tanner came up with a novel solution. Board members and managers can reward outstanding employees with points that can be used to order any gift they want for themselves from O.C. Tanner’s website.

It’s cited as one of Fortune magazine’s 100 best places to work. You should not be surprised to learn that a substantial portion of Fortune’s other 100 best places to work are O.C. Tanner’s clients. (Companies that don’t reward great work don’t make Fortune’s list.)

The company launched a campaign defining great work and asked us here at reddbug to design some infographics for them. One of those infographics told a fascinating story about, of all things, Lego blocks.

In 1974, the Lego company said there were 102,981,500 unique combinations in their standard block set. You’d think, with a number that large, that they must have done some serious mathematical modeling that at least came close to calculating the correct number, but nope. They assumed every stack of Legos would include no more and no fewer than six blocks.

So in 2005, Soren Eiler came along and wrote a program to find the true number. His computer crunched the equations for an entire week before finally calculating the answer, and get this: it turns out that there are actually 915,103,765 unique combinations, almost nine times as many as Lego claimed back in 1974. Now that’s some great work.

With reddbug’s help, O.C. Tanner’s campaign was viewed thousands of times, netting a number of leads and new clients. And remember, O.C. Tanner’s clients are enterprise companies. Just one can yield enough revenue to pay the salaries of several of their own great employees for an entire year.

If you’d like to hire reddbug to help your company with one or more of your own inspiring marketing campaigns, contact us.