2011: The Year of the Tablet

Cave Henricks, our publicist for the new The Idea Hunter book, has published some predictions from their authors regarding the coming year. I thought that this was a good question and it got me thinking about what I thought the biggest change might be (regarding books and executive education). My conclusion was that it could be the mass acceptance of "tablets":

“My prediction is that 2011 will be the year of the tablet: there will be more iPads and other tablets than we would have ever imagined only a few years ago, and the ubiquity of information that they bring with their use will offer us the possibility of profoundly changing the way we work. If, and this is a big “if”, we change our habits to take advantage of information on demand, at our fingertips, 24/7, we can fundamentally redesign our conversational experiences: fact-based conversations could become the norm rather than the exception; simulations, scenario comparisons and prototyping could become common ways of testing new ideas; instantaneous contact with much larger virtual communities via social-networking sites could bring co-creation into our everyday lives. Was all of this possible before the tablet? Of course! But, the tablet, without the vertical notebook screen that implicitly separates us from each other, invites us all into a common fact-seeking conversational experience in a way that no personal computer could ever arrange. We are literally at the dawn of really encouraging “smarter” interactions, but only if we change our habits and our behaviors in consonance with the changing technology that is increasingly available to us.”