Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

This was originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse on April 16, 2016. The corporate t-shirt tells the employees that they have been accepted into the “clan” and that they belong (so long as they play by the rules). But then all honeymoons come to an end. Along with this change in our work status, the corporate t-shirt also goes from riches to rags and gets relegated to being worn for doing the occasional backyard chore. American Indian Totem (CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay) When I mow the backyard (which is not very often) I usually wear a t-shirt that I got from a company I worked for some years ago. That corporate t-shirt is one of a few similar ones I have kept aside to wear for such hot and sweaty jobs. When I mow is also the time when I tend to lapse into faux-intellectual reveries about various life-changing questions (as giving the grass a haircut is not in itself a mind-boggling exercise anyway.) Recently, during one of these Eureka moments, I concluded that these corpo

This was originally posted on   LinkedIn Pulse  on November 14, 2015. Is it time to reevaluate the value (or not) of some of the jargon we have gone used to and to recognise (and “retrench”, to use another euphemism) those dinosaurs who failed to evolve with the times?    “B ig data” has been dethroned as “real-time data” has taken the reins. “Troubleshooting” is on its way out: the preferred term now is either “problem-solving” or “diagnosing”. And, other buzzwords like “virtual team” and “subject matter expert” may also have fallen victim to this extinction event. These were the conclusions reached by a study of 500,000 tech job postings by Seattle firm Textio ( as Bloomberg Business reported recently).   Image credit: By Dellex (Own work) /CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons If a word or phrase is used frequently widely enough - especially if picked up by social media or the blogosphere - it can quickly become part of the industry vernacular. But these buzzwords tend