About being disruptive

I was saying to a friend this week that I felt like my approach to a certain interaction with one of our teams was a bit ‘disruptive’. After using that word, I immediately realised I need to follow that up with ‘not in a positive way’.

It got me to thinking about how that word is being used in tech. It seems like the tech startup ecosystem is often about entering markets in a violent way. ‘Disrupting’ markets adds an even more worrisome additional layer to it: it makes clear that the intention is to conquer a market that is seen as a zero-sum game.