HP's Golden Banana award

SOMETIMES a cigar is just a cigar, Sigmund Freud once observed during a rare light moment. But at the Hewlett-Packard Co, a banana is not just a banana, but a corporate symbol. The company confers the Golden Banana Award on inventive employees. The award is so named because one day a HP engineer showed up at his manager's office with the news that he had solved a longstanding problem. "I did it," he told the manager, who looked around his desk for an appropriate acknowledgment and came up with the banana from his lunch. "Well done. Congratulations," he said, according to 1,001 Ways to Reward Employees, and handed the engineer the banana, which ultimately became, less perishably, the…