The Corporate Storyteller

Is "disruptive technology" making you yearn for the way things were? Or bringing excitment to business as usual and generating creative thoughts for you and your work team?

Technology can certainly be disruptive, such as when people either forget to turn off their cell phones when they go into a meeting or intentionally leave them on in case they get a call they'd rather pay attention to. But while the speedy rate of change in today's world can throw us off balance, it also presents opportunities we never could have imagined just a few years ago.

One change I'm excited about is the emergence of the multimedia e-book. With links to the Web as well as audio and video files and formats designed for e-readers and cell phones, it opens up an entirely new way to "read" a "book". As L. Gordon Crovitz wrote in The Wall Street Journal recently, "It's the ideas that count, not how they're transmitted. Independent bookstores gave way to chains, which are fast giving way to Web-based retailers.... These are new pages in the history of the book, whose final chapters are yet to be written."

What do you think? Will print books co-exist with multimedia formats--or become obsolete?