Were the legendary Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to rise from the dead and take a tour of corporate America today, he’d find it a far different place from the world he inhabited back in the 1950s. For one thing, he’d discover a good portion of the natives speaking a most peculiar dialect, a variant on English built upon a vocabulary of vague but perky buzzwords – one in which “problems” become “action items,” where fired workers are “proactively outplaced,” where serious-minded corporate executives ponder long and hard on the best ways to bring their company “toward wow!” The unsavory characters responsible for this, ahem, paradigm shift? A new breed of management consultants who seem to believe that to save our companies we have to destroy our language first.
Of course, not everyone in the corporate world agrees with the buzzwordization of American English; for every jargon-spouting drone “thriving on chaos” there are probably a dozen cubicle dwellers who cringe each time the boss decides to “interface” with them.
For the past several years, a few of these beleaguered officeworkers have been staging a quiet rebellion against the new linguistic order. Their weapon of choice: a game called buzzword bingo. Buzzword bingo works more or less the same as ordinary bingo – except instead of letters and numbers each card is filled with a random assortment of terms from the management guru lexicon.
Workers who expect a barrage of buzzwords at a meeting or presentation distribute the cards beforehand, then quietly check off phrases as they are uttered by their bosses or coworkers.
The game was invented in 1993 by Tom Davis, a high-level engineer at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, Calif. It soon spread rapidly around Silicon Valley – a place where buzzwords fly fast and thick.
Inspired by Davis, “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams featured the game in his comic strip, thus introducing the concept to the rest of the world. Now there are perhaps a dozen sites on the World Wide Web featuring the game, some offering software for generating random cards, others creating cards on the fly right on the Web.
And, in a “cutting-edge” development of just the last few months, buzzword bingo has been adapted for the Palm Pilot handheld computer, eliminating the cards and making it even easier to sneak in a game.
“Buzzword bingo lets employees stay awake at meetings, have some fun, and send a message about their manager’s or coworker’s posturing, all at the same time,” says Chris Pirazzi, a software engineer who discovered the game while working at Silicon Graphics and who now maintains a Web page devoted to it, located at reality.sgi.com/cpirazzi/bingo/index.html.
The game also has proved popular at college commencements and other ceremonies where guests not necessarily known for their speaking abilities attempt to pass on timeless wisdom in the form of platitudes. In 1996, Al Gore found his address to the graduating seniors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology interrupted by occasional shouts of “bingo!,” as did former astronaut Mae Jemison at Stanford that year.
“A group of undergrad seniors handed out bingo cards right before the commencement ceremony in the football stadium,” recalls Stanford grad Zachary Thacher.
Even some who’ve never played the game credit it with keeping buzzword-mongers on their toes. “After people get to know about buzzword bingo, you don’t even have to play it,” Davis explains. “If you just take out the cards it’s amazing how quickly the whole tone of a meeting will change.”
