B.S. Bingo... WE HAVE A WINNER!!!!

If you've ever worked in the corporate world, you've probably heard of a wonderful game called B.S. Bingo. It consists of a standard bingo style card with overused corporate cliches that few normal people use in everyday conversation but are so pervasive in business circles as to be laughable. When you're in a meeting that just won't end, keep the card in front of you and when you have a Bingo, stand up and yell, "BULL......t!" I have actually seen people playing the game, but I've never seen anyone declare that they were a winner.... but it would sure make the meeting more interesting!

As many of you know, I work for a large multi-national oil and gas company and as you might suspect, there is no shortage of this type of language, but I think the following memo should win a prize as one of the best examples of Corporate BS that I've ever seen. This is the opening paragraph to an actual organization announcement that was issued in our company sometime in the past 15 years. I couldn't believe it at the time so I've kept a copy. I still can't understand it. If you can, you should probably keep it a secret because I'm pretty sure it means there's something seriously wrong with your brain.

Here it is:

ORGANIZATION BULLETIN

In order to re-focus our organization in alignment with our strategy and to provide for (name deleted) project completion, some changes are necessary in the organization. We will seek to enhance the infrastructure and geologic synergies of the OU's and OC's with life cycle synergies, and functional synergies will be enhanced, which will allow us to more effectively focus our personnel resources. This reduces the number of OU's and OC's, and provides better critical mass for our asset grouping. The Commercial group, responsible for functional excellence in the commercial homeroom, as well as Methanol, TransportationInfrastructure, and Oil and Gas sales for (country name deleted), will re realigned into the BD organization. The Graphics group will be realigned reporting to IM. Due to near term drilling activities and the need to more efficiently establish our next project utilizing (name delteted's) expertise, Extraction will be focused on this role. The following organization is effective as of ........:

(Names withheld to protect the identities of the poor schmoes who after reading the above nonsense, still had no clue as to what their new jobs were going to be)

I guess we all just have to figure things out as we go along.

Cheers!

Papa