Buzzword Bingo....

Buzzword Bingo – Still Going Strong? 

Have you ever sat in a business meeting and wondered what everyone is talking about?  I don’t just mean the fact that you’ve switched off for five minutes to stare out of the window and wonder if you’ve got enough sun dried tomatoes for tonight’s pasta dish.  I mean wondering to yourself if the people around you are talking a different language.  Although let’s face it, some meetings are more interesting than others.

I’m talking about when people start talking with Buzzword Bingo.  Some of you may have been exposed to it already, the ‘Corporate Bingo’ speak.  Most of it has now become very common speak in the workplace and has slipped quietly into our vocabulary without any of us realising it. 

I was in a meeting once and my colleague was talking about a particular project that wasn’t going too well.  She said “I think this project could turn into a sausage factory”.  Pardon?  Another colleague at another meeting mentioned that we could get a “Quick and dirty result from producing the report”.  Quick and dirty? !  Isn’t that a term used by the SAS?

Perhaps someone sat down a few years ago behind a very big desk and decided to make up a load of terms that at first no-one would understand but would integrate subliminally into our day-to-day speech. 

For one day only it would be an interesting project to ask everyone to stop the bingo terms and speak properly, with proper words and proper sentences and to say exactly what they mean without using a corny phrase.  In the current corporate world, do you think that this is achievable? I’m not altogether  sure.   Maybe we are so used to this type of terminology that most of us speak it without actually thinking about it.

Here at Insightful Edge, we are a bunch of like minded people.  But it has to be said that on occasion we are prone to the odd ‘Bushism’.   Apart from that, there isn’t a sausage factory in sight.

For those of you not familiar with Buzzword Bingo aka ‘b*llsh*t bingo’, it’s a bingo style game where participants prepare bingo cards with the buzzwords and tick them off when they are spoken during a meeting or speech.  The game is played as a standard bingo game with the winner crossing off the words and then shouting the obligatory “Bingo” when complete.

The game is played where participants feel that the speaker, in an attempt to mask a lack of actual knowledge is speaking in Buzzword Bingo terms rather than providing actual information. 

Clearly a crucial part of the game is having the guts to actually shout ‘Bingo’ at the appropriate moment.  An alternative could be to actually silently mouth the word and hope that no-one guesses what you are doing.

Buzzword Bingo was invented in 1993 by by Silicon Graphics Principal Scientist Tom Davis, in collaboration with Seth Katz. The concept was popularized by a Dilbert comic strip in 1994, in which the characters play during an office meeting.

Your Buzzword Bingo game card to play at your next meeting is below....  Enjoy.

globalization compete scalable up sell bottom line synergy consensus outside the box bandwidth spam transition cohesive BINGO telecommute outsource soft copy multi-tasking deliverable fast track repurpose offline critical path leverage action item seamless

drill down mission-critical efficiency scope localise b2b mitigate cycles target best practice strategic ping BINGO realign ROI FAQ game plan world-class 24/7 collaborate value-added procedural beta virtual proactive