Buzzword bingo

Lisa Endlich's new book, “Optical Illusions: Lucent and the Crash of Telecom,” describes countless details of the corporate cultural clashes inside telecom's youngest 100-year-old company (see page 48). One of the most amusing involves a game that Lucent salespeople played to get through overlong sales teleconferences. The game was called “buzzword bingo.” Before the weekly speakerphone meeting, salespeople would arrange grids of cards bearing the canned phrases they were used to hearing on previous calls, such as “step up,” “pull through” and “stretch goals.” Whenever a salesperson heard one of those phrases, he crossed off a card, hoping to cross off an entire row. When one did, he would sneak the word “bingo” into the conversation, as in responding to a suggestion with, “Bingo, that's a good idea.” More than an entertaining anecdote, the story illustrates the mindset of Lucent employees, to whom sales goals and expectations late in the boom years had become so grossly unrealistic that the whole endeavor seemed like little more than a game. No one looked past the current quarter. Salespeople downplayed their progress to lower expectations, while managers privately asked for results even higher than the “official” goals. And the company ended up selling to customers who couldn't pay just to advance in the game. The book should be required reading for telecom employees, lest they repeat the same route and begin playing games in which everyone eventually loses.