I’m going to join Daniel Pink, blogger and author of Drive, in letting you know how much fun it is to play with Google Lab’s new Books Ngram Viewer. The Ngram Viewer allows you to search for key words among Google’s archived books from 1800 to 2008. Pink compared the rates that the following words appeared: Girl versus Boy, Hope versus Fear, and Beef versus Chicken versus Pork.
I decided to take a more Engine For Change slant to my Ngram Faceoffs. Here are:
Strategy versus Implementation. Is this evidence in support of Dr. Kotter’s claim in Buy-In that strategy has taken off and left strategy implementation academically lagging behind?
Plan versus Implement. I know this one isn’t really fair as plan is a common word and implement is jargon, but I’m not trying to draw a wild conclusion here, except that plan seems to occur nearly 90 times for every mention of implement.
Guiding Coalition. Since Guiding Coalition seems to be the sole domain of Dr. Kotter I’m curious to dig through the database to find the mentions of Guiding Coalition back around 1900 to 1910 that cause that early sawtooth. Would any of my Input-strength readers care to do the digging for me and report back?
Finally, just for the fun of tracking my employer against the brother services, here’s:
Army – Navy – Air Force – Marines.
What great Ngram Faceoffs can you run? If you find anything really interesting, please let us know.
