Stop misusing "Disrupt"

This seems kind of pedantic but the guy gets it.

And if you're a tech entrepreneur and you haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma," it's quite likely you're doing it wrong.

This is true, but ultimately I blame Christensen for applying the word "disruptive" in a different way than its common meaning. Because people already know what "disruptive" and "technology" mean, they get rightly confused when "disruptive technology" means something more specific.

I have the same gripe with the word "revolutionary". It seems every other day I come across some business touting their product as "a revolutionary new... blah blah".

Sorry, your product or service isn't revolutionary until you ACTUALLY create a revolution.

From the perspective of a startup, the most interesting aspect of Clayton Christensen's concept of a disruptive business is that incumbents will choose not to compete with it (at least at first). Disruptive businesses are either "new market", in which case they don't steal the incumbent's existing customers, or "low-end", in which case they take the incumbent's worst customers and the incumbent doesn't care. An example of the latter is the early PC market. Incumbents like Digital Equipment Corp chose not to pursue it. High-end mainframes had higher margins and prices. They were happy to cede the bottom of the market to newcomers, whose products seemed hopelessly cheap and crappy. Of course, the low-end quickly improves and takes more and more of the market. By the time DEC recognized this problem, it was too late. Same with the Japanese cars and electronics (which were junky at first), or minimills in the steel industry.

Sustaining innovations are incremental improvements that fit within the incumbent's business model. The incumbent can easily and lucratively apply them to their existing customers.

The disruptive/sustaining distinction is important for startups because, "Incumbents almost always win battles of sustaining innovations. Their superior resources and well-honed processes are almost insurmountable strengths. Incumbents, however, almost always lose battles where the attacker has a legitimate disruptive innovation." (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/3374.html)

Christensen's disruptive/sustaining distinction is mostly lost in the press about innovation, where "disruptive" is used to describe either. That's life in the English language.

Incidentally, I think disruption is more about business models, which often, but not always, apply new technology.

It's a buzzword.

Somebody somewhere writes a modestly insightful article for a high-profile American magazine such as Vanity Fair or The Atlantic, giving a pop-science view of some research of theirs or by someone else. They give it a snappy title and the description has short punchy prose spiced with tasty anecdotes. Most importantly, they come up with an extremely simple but memorable summative word or phrase.

This article is widely mentioned in other major magazines, in newspapers and the interblogs. A publisher contacts the original article author, and 6-9 months later a padded-out version of the original article appears in print. It is hailed as "a total revolution in the way we think about X", with favourable coverage in the London and New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. It shoots up on Amazon for about a week, before slowly fading out.

But very few people actually ever read the book. Fewer indeed the article that spawned it. And nobody but nobody tries to find the original research. All that remains is the punchy phrase or summation.

Outsource.

Cloud.

Pivot.

10,000 hours.

Long tail.

Disrupt.

Before long the punchy phrase is everywhere. It becomes the subject of blog posts, gets worked into marketing copy and the titles of presentations. It is steadily diffused into the day to day lexicon so thoroughly that it passes beyond cliche into mere nothingness. It is beyond explication because it means anything and everything.

Eventually the punchy phrase loses its currency. It is old hat. Slowly the term fades from the interblogs, disappears from the marketing copy, drops out of the daily jargon.

Then, one day, somebody somewhere writes a modestly insightful article ...

No one falls to their death any more, they all plunge.

Disrupt is the new pivot.

Kind of like how "killer" now simply means "competitor".

I prefer "Craigslist" as a verb, as in "Netflix just Craigslisted's Blockbuster", meaning to destroy their revenue stream with new technology.

You are disrupting the disrupt word.

But Silicon Valley is obsessed with finding the next big social wine store recommendation app with location-based realtime coupon analytics. You gotta go for the big ideas if you want to succeed.

Stop telling me what words mean.