Buzzword Bingo

Buzzwords are annoying but MostlyHarmless. If you want real fear, see AlarmBellPhrase.

Get a piece of paper. Draw a grid on it. Now write in the boxes as many silly, pointless buzzwords as you can think of. Here are some to get you started:

Enterprise-class
Going forward
Leverage
Competency
Cross-product
Run that up the flagpole
Add value
Programme management
Create synergies
Systemization
Business continuity
Take a view
You get the idea
.Net Architecture
Increase Productivity (n)-Fold
Think Outside the Box
- In ten years: "Think outside the cloud"

Photocopy it and give it your colleagues. Go to a meeting and take highlighter pens. Choose a fun meeting, like one with a salesperson in it. Now here's the hard part: when you've crossed off five buzzwords, stand up and shout BINGO. First one to shout out, wins.

Sounds easy doesn't it? But you have to stay awake long enough to get five.

--RichardEmerson nicked this from one of those chain email things.

I received one with a slightly more offensive title, but here are some more words:

Bench Marking
Ticks in Boxes Ooh, that's a good one - it refers to BuzzwordCompliance?!
Lessons Learnt
Touch Base
Bread and Butter
Empower Employees
Strategic Fit
Take That Offline
Ball Park
Internet Time

The list goes on...

We used to do this. We had a program that would randomly generate a set of 5x5 bingo cards where each card was unique. Each square would have a buzzword with the center square marked FREE. The card was printed on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper and was formatted so that it could be folded in half and unobtrusively kept in a Franklin planner.

We used these in our large group staff meetings for months. One day I was I was watching someone else marking off a bingo word when the manager who was sitting next to him noticed the bingo card. The manager leaned over for a better look, then took the card away from the employee for closer scrutiny. "Oh, oh. We are in trouble now," I thought. Actually, it was no problem. The manager just let us know that from that point on, he wanted to make sure he got his own bingo card before each staff meeting.

Now you can GenerateBingoCardsInManyProgrammingLanguages. Lots of fun (but we're not subtle enough players to get away with doing this for months... too bad)

Didn't BuzzwordBingo start with a Dilbert strip? The first two frames had Wally explaining the rules and passing out cards; then in the last frame the boss remarks, You're very attentive today. My proactive leadership must be working! -- which gets the reply Bingo, sir.

At least Adams was one of the first:

A similar game is Buzzword Baseball, where different buzzwords are assigned different values like "Single," "Double," "Pop fly, out; runners advance." Everyone scores the same game, so you should pick teams ahead of time. The game ends after nine innings (or 8 1/2, if the home team is ahead); if the meeting finishes before the game (it could happen), you go back to the end of the last complete inning.

Variants of this - tailored to the speech habits of individual professors - have been around for at least twenty years, and possibly for thousands of years.

The latest variant employed in some lectures parodies what seems to be the choice of some lecturers for their presentations, PowerPointBingo. This particular AnonymousCoward missed out on the last round due to choosing "gunshot sound".

I played it around 1983, with a high school history teacher kindly providing the phrases. "Uh" was a strike; "bitter, bloody battles" was a grand slam. (Forgive us, Mr. B., for doing that instead of learning about the MaginotLine?.)

When I worked doing tech support for the (very small) ISP I am at, we used to have Customer Support Bingo, which had a selection of

The most annoying/frequent-calling customers
common, but silly questions
particular key phrases ("My friend, who knows about computers...(told me to dunk my PC in treacle)")

-- HowardJones

Actually, I preferred the "slightly more offensive" name mentioned above. I also think it adds to the fun if everybody gets the same bingo card. That way, inevitably at one point in the meeting, everybody stands up and shouts "Bullshit". Very good effect! -- HaskoHeinecke

Yeah, we've had many full-company meetings where several of us, all of a sudden, shout out Bullshit!. This is much better than shouting Bingo! as it also provides a commentary. I think ours uses corporate speak lingo like "Out of the Box", "Proactive", and so on. -- RobertDiFalco

I know that some of you are tongue-in-cheek (oh no, might that be a buzzword from our fathers' generation?) but many of the geek patrol here are serious when they toss distaste or worse at our evolving corporate vocabulary. I must partially protest the working class argument that this buzz-s#$! is to be mocked or ridiculed.

In a culture where the division of the classes is never more evident than in the corporate settings, it is vocabulary that binds or separates us - when it is not the words we mock so much as their lack of real meaning to those of us who drag the pyramid in place. We would embrace empowerment if we ever got some.

My very little point is, let us mock the system that preaches "collaboration", all the while hiding its games and agendas from the "team". So the next time you are tempted to yell Bull*%$, remember, to be intellectually correct, you need to yell Asshole!

Bill

At a job interview, I was asked if I've "deployed custom solutions". I said, "No, but I've gone to people's businesses and helped them with their computer set-ups," and laughed (alone). The senior interviewer looked at me as if a live snake just crawled out of my eye socket. I did not necessarily ever hear from them again.

The Big-Box Tango

They used to call them "mainframes", but that has an old-school metallic sound, so they started calling them "servers" and it worked for a good while and sold boxes, but it got stale and so now they call them "clouds".

See Karl Geiger's updated http://www.businessbuzzwordbingo.com/ (moved from USC). See also: ActivitiesForBoringMeetings.

CategoryGamesandIcebreakers