Are you ready to make some noise in 2020? Are you ready to kick things around, throw out the old and  in with the new? 

Are you a “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” kind of person? 

Or are you a “If it ain’t broke… so what? We can make it better!” kind of person? 

Are you the kind of person who sees things as they are and asks “why?” 

Or do you see things as they could be, and ask, “why not?” 

In short are you a disruptor? Do you enjoy shaking things up to see what’s going to happen…or rather to see how they could be better?

How about innovation? 

Are you an innovator? 

Are you always willing to jump out of your comfort zone to experiment on what you could do better, or what your company could do better?

Let’s take a look at what author Mark Deymaz in his book Disruption says are 10 Signs You’re a Disruptive Innovator:

1. You’ve been called “a maverick” by someone to whom you report.
2. You are driven all the more to prove others wrong when they tell you, “it can’t be done.”
3. You’ve been fired from a job not because of poor performance but because your drive, innovation, and personality threatened an established leader.
4. You’ve not been promoted to higher positions of leadership or asked to join governing organizational bodies under whom you’ve served faithfully, responsibly, and effectively, and the reason given does not make sense; that is, it’s spin and everyone knows it.
5. You are not afraid to respectfully question or challenge the thinking of those in authority over you in the presence of others.
6. When given a to-do list, you decide for yourself what really needs to be done, what does not need to be done, how to do some things differently (better in your mind), and add things to the list, confident that you can justify your decisions if called into question.
7. You have barely begun to implement change and someone to whom you report suggests you need to slow things down.
8. You will not step perfecting an idea or something you’re working on until you achieve your aim or run out of time. “It’s good enough” is not in your lexicon.
9. You suggest new ways of thinking, being and doing, and others just smile.
10. You’ve brought a vision to life and stayed long enough to hear others say, “I wasn’t sure it could be done, but you did it. You proved me wrong.”

How about it? Does this sound like you? If it does, then what are you waiting for? Have the courage to start implementation, start making waves. If you are convinced that that there is a better way, then try it out. See if it works…and if I doesn’t then pick yourself off and try something else. Failure only becomes a reality when you quit, otherwise it is the kindling for success.

But above all if you are going to try something new, something that is unpopular in your company, you have to have the perseverance to see it through. One of the great disruptive innovators of our time, the late Steve Jobs, had this to say about what it takes to be a successful disruptive entrepreneur:

I’m convinced that about half of what  separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You pour so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments and times that most people give up. And I don’t blame them; it’s really tough, and it consumes your life…unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive, you’re going to give up. So, you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about. Otherwise, you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through; and I think that’s half the battle right there.

As  I look at our own industry, I see so many opportunities to make things better, so many ways to improve the way we do business, that I feel that if we would just lift our heads, take a deep breath, and take another, closer look, at what we are doing and then study, think, and innovate on how we could make things better, we could do just that. Isn’t it time as we face a new decade, arguably the seventy fifth year of the modern version of our industry, we do better? Perhaps we could find a way to at least lift our industry average delivery and quality performance into the 90^th percentile? Or develop better ways to deliver great customer service? I would like to challenge all of you in 2020 to intentionally focus on finding ways to make your company better and our industry better. We need to all become seekers, seeking a better way to do everything.

It’s only common sense.