The likelihood that you are disrupting someone or they are disrupting you — in any meaningful sense of the word — is about the same as being struck by lightning. The logic is easy to follow:

For a disruption to occur there must be a disruptor and disruptee.
Their products or services must be viable alternatives to one another.
The disruptor must be growing its customer base at the expense of the disruptee.
It must be beyond the adaptive capacity of the disruptee to respond to the new entrant with a more compelling offering.
It must also be impossible for the disruptee to copy the disruptor’s proposition or simply acquire them.

If these conditions aren’t met it’s just good, old-fashioned competition, but why does it matter?

Because the prospect of disruption turns people’s brains to jelly. Incumbents swap clear-headed analysis for outright panic or endless hand-wringing. And start-ups — drunk on the prospect of dominating the market — fixate on scaling and forego the basics, like sound unit economics, cost control or even obeying the law.

Next time you hear the D word, ask yourself — "Do they actually just mean competition?" And calibrate your response accordingly.

See this post on LinkedIn