Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line: FunnyBusiness

1235 Points

It's now 9:11 p.m. I am finished playing loop for the time being.

After playing Loop for about an hour, I finally decided to read the help section. It was very helpful. After another hour I was able to raise my score to 1235---not bad considering I started the day at under 250 points. 

What I've learned:

I have an addictive personality.

I can play just as well with the touchpad as with the mouse

I still have another hour or two of work to do.

My eyes hurt, my finger is aching and I'm feeling loopy.

Black Knight versus Loop

After making fun of me for playing Loop, my daughter Berit tried the game. She didn't score that much higher than I did for a first try. I felt vindicated.

She then asked if I would like to try her favorite game ---  The Black Knight . It's a game where you are a medieval tax collector and get to use all sorts of things to smash everything and every one that crosses your path.

Didn't make it past level one on my first try. Played again after a discouraging conversation about getting a repair person to come out and look at my washing machine. Customer Service indicated that their first available was next Tuesday.

I reminded them that this would be a "return" call on a problem that was not corrected on the last visit. After a 15 minute hold, she informed me they could squeeze me in next Monday.

This time I got to level two on Black Knight.  But, my score dropped  to 965 on Loop...Maybe it's not such a good idea to mix computer games.

1005 points

It's now 10:10 AM. I have started playing Loop with my mouse instead of the touchpad on the laptop. Makes a big difference. Earned 1005. Feeling like I can match Catra 1955 by this evening.

My daughter Berit walked into my office and asked why I like playing this game. Her response. Weird.

Loopty Loop

Scooted over to my friend Nancy White's blog to see what she's been  talking about lately and was thrilled to find this intriguing post called Work Avoidance? Loop, a Shockwave game.

While most people may dismiss this as child's play, this incredibly intriguing game is more than a simple creature capture game! Part puzzle, part fantasy, it's pure addiction! The butterflies are everywhere!" And people wonder why I don't get around to answering all my email!

Here's the link to the game.

On my first try I got to chapter 5. Just earned 230 points.  To put that in perspective Catra1955 scored 1,385 points.

Hope to increase my skill level significantly by the end of the day. Besides a lovely lunch meeting, I am hunkered down on a writing assignment all day, and anticipating that Loop will play a big role in this writing assignment.

On a serious note, the game requires that you break some Pavlovian habits like clicking.

It has visuals that you intuitively "click on" to get to the next level,  but clicking won't get you there. In this game, getting to the next level requires drawing a loop, not a click.

A great reminder  today to avoid assumptions, try new things and think outside of the loop. 

Have fun.

Schedule Chicken

Forget the company softball team. The real game being played in many corporations is known as Schedule Chicken-- a game where no one on a team wants to fess up that a project is going to be delayed. 

I had never heard of Schedule Chicken until last Friday. I am evidently way out of the loop on current corporate patois, Victor Stone wrote about Schedule Chicken back in 1999, saying that Microsoft was banning the practice. 

No way of knowing whether the good folks at Microsoft were successful at banning the game. However, according to my sources, Schedule Chicken is Alive and Well and living in the halls of corporations throughout the country.

"[Schedule Chicken] happens when two or more areas of a product claim they can deliver their features at a ridiculously early date because each assumes the other feature area team is lying even worse about how long it will take them to deliver their features. This charade marches forward past one psychedelic checkpoint after another until just before the goods are actually due. A more seasoned team lead will delay copping to what is painfully obvious for as long as humanly possible, hoping someone else will break first and jump out of their car. The ceremony where the team lead has to admit the emperor isn't wearing any clothes results in a tribal ritual that rivals Inca sacrifices, except that the virgin probably felt better about her fate. It is very difficult for the offending feature team to recover from being the furthest out on the schedule—because now that the truth is known, all everyone else has to do to look good is to finish just before that late team. Even if the schedule chickens end up beating the deadline, it is nearly impossible for the people on that team to beat the stigma of being unable to stay on a schedule."

According to Stone, Schedule Chicken is based on that famous scene in Rebel Without A Cause  where James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Corey Allen use hot rods and a cliff to play "chicken.'   In the movie,the participants take their hot rods and race towards a cliff. The first one to jump out before the car crashes over the cliff is "the chicken."

It is a dangerous game. In the movie, Corey Allen's jacket strap got caught on the car door and he went over the cliff.

Welcome back to work. Hope you had a restful Memorial Day.

The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Speak

"Working Very Tight" was not an expression I was familiar with. In fact it’s not even listed on one of my favorite Blogs Buzzwhack.
The term.”working very tight” came up in a conversation I was eavesdropping on. Actually, it wasn’t as if I had to strain to hear the conversation. It was one of those situations where the four people involved seemed oblivious to the fact that those of us sitting next to them could hear  everything they said.

The four, sitting in the gate area of the airport, were discussing a new company policy requiring them to use their own cars to go to meetings off campus . The problem? They couldn’t expense it.

That’s when one of the co-workers said, “We’re working very tight."  Here’s the thing about buzzwords. If I asked people to guess what it meant, there’s a good chance some people would interpret  the phrase in a very positive way saying their team  had sailed through the forming, storming, norming stages of team development and were now performing like a high performance team should.

Of course, that’s not what it means--at least in this workplace. Working Very Tight obviously means the company is pinching pennies. Bleeding the turnip dry. In the red. About to downsize.

Having an expression that is company-centric is actually a  very common phenomenon.Mary Zellmer-Bruhn, a professor in the strategic management and organization department at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota says,“By being intentionally obscure to the outside it’s hard for people to know what they are up to and to copy them. Having your own language helps organizations maintain a competitive advantage."

Zellmer- Bruhn also says that  having a corporate language plays an important role in the development of the corporate culture. “It makes people feel they are part of a group and that creates loyalty. People are more committed and feel special when they speak a similar language."

Turns out that in corporate speak, like music and books, there are a variety of genres. The genre your company uses says a lot about the culture.

Militaristic Corporate Speak: A company that relies on  terminology like deploy, flying under the radar, and annihilate the competition, probably is a hierarchical command and control organization that is concerned with job titles and clear boundaries.

Sports Oriented Corporate Speak : Companies that like to say there is no “I” in Team , tag-up, and drop the ball, suggest that the organization is more fluid.

Acronym Corporate Speak:Then there are the companies that talk in acronyms. This is a culture that doesn't want to waste time. They charge by the hour and using three syllables throughout the day can add up to lost revenues.

Recently, I was interviewing an executive from an acronym rich culture. As he was talking about the EU, the PD and COI I had to interrupt, multiple times to have him translate.  Truth is I got hung up on EU.—I couldn’t figure out why he was referring to the European Union. I was totally 404. He finally explained he was  talking about the organization’s Economic Unit. Good thing it isn’t a global company that has to deal with the real EU.

On the other hand there are corporate buzzwords that transcend individual corporations. It seems that once a phrase gains some traction and is used 24/7, it can make some people go postal.

Now there's relief for the buzzword challenged. It's called Lingo Bingo.

The Freeman Institute ™ provides this home-made version along with an explanation of game rules on its website.

How to play Lingo Bingo
Very simple. Check off each block when you hear these words during a meeting, seminar, or phone call. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally,you've won Lingo Bingo.

Some of the words that you can use to create your Lingo Bingo Card:

Synergy, Strategic Fit, Core Competencies, Best Practice, Revisit,
Paradigm, Bottom Line, Result-Driven, Out of the Loop, Benchmark,
24/7, Ball Park,                 Game Plan ,               Client Focus[ed], Mindset,
FastTrack, Win-Win,        Value-Added,              Empower [ment],          Leverage,
Take That Offline, Think Outside the Box ,At the End of the Day ,Proactive, Knowledge Base

You can  also get a  free pre-made Lingo Bingo card from Business Buzzword Bingo

That's about it.  G2G. BRB next week.

Have a story?  I want to hear it! The success of this column depends on people sharing their stories-- so whether its a boss, co-worker, corporate policy or just general corporate nonsense, let me hear from you --your identity and the identity of your place of employment will be protected.  The goal is to tell the story, not get anyone fired.