Skip to main content

Whats a carriage?

The digital native in my family was reading an Agatha Christie book.

"Whats a carriage? Does it mean a horse drawn carriage?"
"Perhaps yes, that’s what it should mean in Agatha Christie times, though it is possible it is also a motor carriage." I was about to continue the story of how carriage became car and so on, before which he said
"But how does this carriage have so many parts – second class carriage, smoking carriage and all that?"
"Oh, then it should be a train"
Yes, it is a train, I read a little further

So many words that have a specific meaning for us have no meaning for digital natives. It is the same for every generation – many words lose meanings and many words acquire meanings.

In my generation, a lot of our mother tongue words have gone – we no longer use them – which is sad – separate story for some other time.


As this digital native generation comes into the workplace, they will not relate to many words and terms at work that are basically a continuation of the previous non-digital generation. Today we have not thought of it and we continue these terms as hand me downs when they have no real meaning or when the meaning has changed.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...
Post a Comment
Read more

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call
Post a Comment
Read more