Daily Inspiration: “At this very moment, someone within your industry is pursuing the very big, bold, disruptive ideas that you fear!”

“At this very moment, someone within your industry is pursuing the very big, bold, disruptive ideas that you fear!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

This speech, for the Interactive Manufacturing Exchange Conference in Las Vegas, 2010 launched me into opening dozens of major manufacturing conferences across North America through the next decade! It was a pretty significant event – at dinner the night before, I shared the table with the newly retired CEO of Porsche and did a short teaser keynote for 200 CEOs of major Fortune 1,000 manufacturing companies.

The next morning, my keynote was aimed at several thousand more manufacturing executives – engineers, senior executives, product innovation visionaries, and more. And it was here that my story of Tesla Motors began to crystallize – the big thinker with bold ideas and disruptive concepts. And now, look at where we are today!

This was also the event where one audience member pointedly asked me if I could run for the Presidency of the United States. I must have done something right – check my response!

At this moment in time, I was about 7 years into telling my Tesla story on stage – I was using it as an example of disruptive thinking at work, within the context of my “World-class innovators” theme.

Fast forward.

Today, every industry is now surrounded by similar big, bold visionaries, many of them located in Silicon Valley and other hi-tech centers of disruptive, fast-paced thinking. This (often younger) generation has no patience for the stodgy business models of yesterday, the careful, plodding methodology of their forebears, the slow and deliberate decision-process of those who preceded them, the comfortable structure that defines complacency.

Their focus is bold, their method is speed, and their weapon of choice is technology and connectivity.

Their target is you.

If you aren’t running scared at this very moment – realizing that you are a slow-moving dinosaur in a world of fast-moving meteors, you aren’t scared enough! You need to feel the fear of disruption deep in your soul, the panic of unbalanced competition buried within your nexus, and the worry of imminent attack ingrained within your psyche.

You need to bristle with the anticipation of imminent destruction – because if you don’t act, that is your reality.

You then need to channel that fear into action.

This gives you a choice – you can choose to try to ignore the big, bold thinkers with the crazy ideas who surround you – or you shift the ground beneath you and challenge them.