

Stop misusing "Disrupt" - tg3
http://tgriff3.tumblr.com/post/12580157798/disrupt-is-not-a-synonym-for-compete-in

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jeffreymcmanus
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.

~~~
Maro
Put "have read book X" on the buzz list.

I know plenty of people who have not read TID and are doing it just right.

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
Let me get this straight: you're taking a stance against reading books?
Fascinating.

~~~
subsection1h
Let me get this straight: you put words in peoples' mouths to create straw men
that you sarcastically describe as fascinating?

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wmf
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.

~~~
tryitnow
Exactly. Words should be based on their dictionary definitions, not
necessarily some new idea a biz prof came up with.

In Christensen's defense I doubt he ever thought "disrupt" was going to be
used so widely (and incorrectly). I would bet if he had to do it over again,
he'd use a different, more specific term.

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axefrog
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.

~~~
gujk
Until then, it is only magical.

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neilrahilly
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.

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jacques_chester
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 ...

~~~
mmahemoff
See also "agile", "lean", and the winner is: "synergy".

This is an unfortunate reality, as these words are all still useful in their
original meaning and there are no replacement terms. So you're damned if you
do, damned if you don't. Use the word and people cringe. Don't use the word
and you lose the power of expression.

Not that you can stop it, or should try to. Anyone who does is naieve about
the way language evolves.

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

~~~
sehugg
I hear the rate of plunging is surging.

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ctide
Disrupt is the new pivot.

~~~
PakG1
Dude, it was coined long before pivot. :)

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

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

~~~
sliverstorm
Err, Craigslist? Destroy with new technology? What about Craigslist uses even
the slightest glimmer of new technology?

~~~
zdw
Craiglist single handedly turned the newspaper industry on end by offering
free local classified ads online, which were previously a major revenue source
for newspapers.

The tech doesn't matter as much as the effect - a tiny upstart company totally
changed the business landscape of a large entrenched industry with a tiny
staff and budget.

~~~
sliverstorm
Oh, I thought you were talking about Craigslist vs. eBay.

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jobrupt
You are disrupting the disrupt word.

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wavephorm
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.

~~~
sliverstorm
It seems the author is simply objecting to the perception that you gotta call
your idea disruptive if you want to succeed (regardless whether it is).

It's of course o.k. to call it that if it is, but if it is not-

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mikeryan
Stop telling me what words mean.

~~~
sliverstorm
So long as you insist on using them incorrectly, no.

:)

~~~
PakG1
Languages evolve to align with how people use words, not the other way around,
in the long run. This is why gay today is not gay centuries ago. Why brand
names like Kleenex and Xerox can be acceptably used in everyday language
without actually referring to those products.

~~~
kelnos
Yes, languages evolve.

But "gay", "kleenex", and "xerox" (still) mean specific things, even if not
what they originally meant, or if their scope has trivially increased.
Gay=homosexual, Kleenex=tissue, Xerox=copier.[1]

The problem is when a word is diluted so much that it can mean any number of
things, to the point where it's useless as a descriptor of anything because
it's too ambiguous.

disruptive=?? Something that displaces an incumbent by changing the game
entirely? Something that steals market share? Something that's just done much
better than what was done in the past? Useless.

It would be as if "gay" was in as common usage for "happy and carefree" as it
is for "homosexual". If you said "Bob is gay", it'd be entirely unclear what
you meant.

[1] Although, interestingly, I find the latter two falling out of favor. I
much much more often hear "tissue" or "copier"/"copy machine".

