If you're anything like me, when you're out at a store, or at a yard sale, you're always drawn to the book table. You already have too many books in your house, but … you have to look. You simply like books.

One of them catches your eye because it's a Sherlock Holmes book, and you love Holmes. But it catches your eye for the wrong reason. It looks amateurish. You can tell right away that it was not professionally done. The cover art is awful. The spine is blank. There's no bar code on the back cover. When you look inside, there's no copyright page — it just rushes to the text, and the text isn't set well. There are odd breaks, and it's hard to tell one paragraph from the next.

Somebody just downloaded the text off the internet and slapped a cover on it. It's shoddy work, and you toss it aside with a little bit of disgust.

But why? From a purely functional perspective, what does it matter? It's still got the whole story. Do you really need those other features?

Whoever published the thing was just trying to make a quick buck, and what's the ROI on a copyright page, anyway? Why should the publisher waste time and money on fancy features when this simpler version, published at home in Word, does just fine? After all, a lot of books have been published like this, and lots of copies were sold. They didn't need all the frills and flourishes.

I'm sure you see through that sort of thinking. There's more to a book than words on a page. There's a bit of art to it as well, and a book that isn't done well gets mentally categorized along with books about crazy conspiracy theories or other fringe topics.

There probably is an ROI on doing a book well, but it would be very hard to calculate it. The more important thing is that you simply don't want to be the company that does a book so poorly. The other thing to realize is that the standards are always changing.

Most things in life are getting better all the time. My kids are grown now, but recently I was shopping for baby paraphernalia, and it's astonishing how much better everything is. Nobody today would buy the backpack I used to carry my kids around the park, and no football player wants to use my old helmet.

Once an improvement is made in a product or process, everybody else adopts that improvement or gets left behind.

A few years ago you couldn't find a bag of frozen vegetables with a zip-lock resealable top. Now it's becoming standard. And once somebody finally uses a zip-lock bag for breakfast cereal (what's holding that up, anyway?), every brand will have to follow suit quickly.

Just yesterday I noticed a huge improvement on the ordinary zip-lock sandwich bag. The plastic on one of the sides has an extra tab so it's easy to grab both sides and open the bag. It's a great idea, and within months everybody who makes zip-lock bags will revise their manufacturing process to do the same.

All this applies to your business as well. It doesn't matter if you think you need a Facebook page. Everybody expects you to have one, so if you don't, you'll look unprofessional.

There's room for different strategies about innovation. You might be out ahead of the pack, trying crazy new ideas, or you might be a fast follower — waiting for someone else to spend their time and money blazing new paths while you wait to see if they work.

You might even be a slightly slow follower. But you can't afford to ignore innovation. You have to keep up with what people expect of a modern, professional organization or you'll be selling my old baby backpack to people who expect modern backpacks.

Along those lines, consider this New Year's exercise. Make a list of what "not being left behind" means in 2016 for your business. Here are some ideas to get you started.

• If you don't already, you have to have a strategy for mobile. At a minimum that will affect the layout of your emails, how you do e-commerce and how you deliver content.
• You need to start collecting and using your customer data. That means web visitors, recording actions people take on your website, organizing your email lists, making sense of your subscriber data, matching it all up with your prospects …. You need to have a strategy for any and all data you collect or can collect.
• Many websites are using chat for customer service these days. Are you?
• Do you let users track delivery of their products?
• Do you allow customers to review your products, or leave feedback?

I'm sure you can come up with more, and please feel free to mention them.

Not every innovation will apply to your business, and you have to make reasonable economic decisions about whether to implement them. But you can't afford to be the company that looks like it belongs in an old movie.

Once an idea catches on, nobody will ever do it the old way again. You won't find a car that doesn't have intermittent wipers, or lots of cup holders, and you don't want to be the publisher that refuses to catch up with the times.