Unsuspecting Executives Become
Fair Game in 'Buzzword Bingo'
By ELIZABETH MACDONALD and ASRA Q. NOMANI
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ray Mundt, chairman of Unisource Worldwide Inc., has just learned that
some of his employees have been playing a popular game called "buzzword
bingo," in which participants track the jargon their bosses utter during
staff meetings.
"I don't know," Mr. Mundt muses, "how this is going to interface with
the communications side. I think it will deter from it."
Bingo!
Word Play
The '90s are supposed to have given the world the transformed
workplace -- employees who embrace liberating technology working in
organizations themselves liberated of hierarchies and craving the team
input of the working stiff.
Maybe so. But in cubicles and conference rooms at companies from annuity
sellers to paper distributors, drones and peons are slyly mocking the
new corporate culture -- and their cliche-spouting bosses. One of their
weapons is an underground game called buzzword bingo, which works like a
surreptitious form of regular bingo. Buzzwords -- "incent," "proactive,
"impactfulness," for example -- are preselected and placed on a
bingo-like card in random boxes. Players sit in meetings and conferences
and silently check off buzzwords as their bosses spout them; the first
to fill in a complete line wins. But, in deference to the setting, the
winner typically coughs instead of shouting out "bingo."
"Buzzword bingo arose as a reaction against half-truth and
responsibility-dodging" in the workplace, says former Silicon Graphics
Inc. software engineer Chris Pirazzi. When Mr. Pirazzi, now a software
engineer elsewhere, worked at the high-tech company, he wrote bingo
cards featuring phrases like, "At Stanford, we ..." (In Silicon Valley,
it's hip to let people know you attended Stanford University.)
The game, by all accounts, began at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View,
Calif. Tom Davis, a scientist and one of the company's founders, says
that one day in early 1993, he was sitting in the office of a friend who
had scrawled corporate-speak on his blackboard. A light bulb went off,
and Mr. Davis wrote a computer program to generate bingo cards filled
with the jargon he had seen, plus motivational cliches like "Step up to
it." He says he coined the name "buzzword bingo" and passed the cards
along to colleagues with a note written in the spirit of the new game:
"The ball's in your court."
His employees took the ball and ran with it. Since then, the game has
spread up and down the corporate and governmental landscape like an
out-of-control empowerment session.
High Speakers, Hijinks
Seniors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology played bingo at a
graduation ceremony two years ago when Vice President Al Gore spoke,
feverishly marking his buzzwords, including a Gore perennial:
"information superhighway." Mr. Gore came prepared -- someone tipped him
off before his appearance. When students cheered after he uttered the
word "paradigm," the vice president then asked, "Did I hit a buzzword?"
During a later speech by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Labour
delegates played a decidedly U.K. version called "New Labour, New
Bingo." Their handmade cards included some of Mr. Blair's notable
platitudes: "stakeholder" and "greater say." Blair spokesman Godric
Smith says of the bingo episode: "Real high-minded, big-picture stuff."
Someone eventually sent a copy of the game to cartoonist Scott Adams,
inspiring its appearance in a Dilbert comic strip. "It's subversive,"
says Mr. Adams, who admits to using the word "optimizing" in a recent
conversation. "It's as naughty as you can get without getting fired."
Indeed, as far as anyone knows, nobody has been fired over buzzword
bingo, perhaps because it's usually played below the radar of corporate
superiors. In some cases, peers use it to loosen up meetings: At First
Colony Life Insurance Co., Lynchburg, Va., annuity salesman David Doran
recently told eight co-workers that they couldn't leave his meeting
until they used all the buzzwords he had printed on a flip chart --
company-handbook argot such as "voice of the customer" and "what's our
deliverable on this?"
As the meeting dragged on to an hour, "they were all trying to steer the
conversation to use all the buzzwords in one sentence," Mr. Doran says.
"It was hysterical."
Even some bosses sympathize. At Unisource, a paper distributor, Mr.
Mundt, the chairman whose own employees play the game, says, "I can
understand why workers are playing because I have heard a lot of
speakers who are basically boring or they're not saying anything."
Goring the Cliche-Speakers
Ridiculing double-speak, in fact, is the singular object of the game for
many. Software engineer Spencer Sun says he got colleagues to play at a
San Francisco firm owned by a corporation he identifies as "Big Evil
Parent Company." The chief executive arrived to deliver "thinly
sugar-coated bad news" about declining sales. To boost the troops'
spirits, Mr. Sun distributed buzzword bingo cards before a meeting with
the CEO "as a way of thumbing our noses at the whole thing."
One day last fall, Seattle paper saleswoman Joyce Boewe figured she was
in for another dull meeting and decided to liven things up with a
rousing bingo match. Before the meeting, and unbeknownst to her bosses
at Websource Inc., a unit of Unisource, Ms. Boewe quietly handed out
bingo cards filled with corporate-speak such as "core competency"
"partnership" and "net net." During the meeting, the staff unobtrusively
checked off target words as they were used by various speakers. Whispers
and smiles shot through the room.
Then things abruptly turned cutthroat. Saleswoman Susan Rowe "started
asking the speakers leading questions to draw out buzzwords that were on
her own card," says salesman Hume Crawford. No matter -- Ms. Rowe says
her efforts were in vain when too few buzzwords got used and the game
ended in a stalemate. She thinks, though, that her questions might have
won brownie points. There is, she observes, an apple-polishing aspect to
buzzword bingo: You can excel at bingo while appearing to hang on to the
boss's every word. Certainly, "it keeps you awake" during dull meetings,
she says.
More than a dozen Web sites now sport game cards that Internet surfers
can download, often free. Web-site designer Benjamin Yoskovitz says he
is writing what he calls the "Official Buzz Word Bingo Rule Book." One
modification he is devising assigns points to buzzwords; employees tally
scores at the end of meetings if no one hits bingo.
It may, in fact, be time for some rule changes. The game can easily get
out of hand. Four employees, of gofast.net Inc., a St. Paul, Minn.,
Internet company, have been playing a covert marathon game at staff
meetings for nearly three months. The employees rigged their Palm Pilot
hand-held computers to churn out new cards whenever they have a meeting.
When a player wins, the computer will make a melodic beeping noise.
To date, the beep has yet to sound, indicating a need to reprogram the
computers "to create more winning opportunity," says Eric Miller, one of
the players, letting fly with a buzzterm of his own.
