“颠覆”已到退休时

    最初，颠覆（disrupt）这个词听起来机智而且风趣。现在，它却因过度使用而显得乏味无比。同时，在这个过程中，这个词也完全丧失了它所具有的力量。颠覆是个很好的词，但由于人们严重滥用，它已经失去了原本的力量。我们已经忘了它的含义，尽管一些聪明人专门通过专栏文章来提醒我们，如今颠覆一个行业究竟意味着什么。

    我对这个词的解释平实（不够伶俐）而简短（不长）：颠覆就是分裂、破碎、成为碎片，它有害、令人不安、而且杂乱无章。

    更近一些时候，有人把这个词用在了高深莫测的科技术语里，做出这个创举的是哈佛商学院（Harvard Business School）教授克莱顿•克里斯滕森。他的著作《创新者悖论》（The Innovator's Dilemma）探讨了各种各样的“颠覆性创新”如何将各个行业闹得天翻地覆（硅谷人士对这本书推崇备至）。当然这些大家都知道，但这一点还是值得重复一下：克里斯滕森在书中指出：颠覆，就算不是有害的，也必然是危险的。他的核心论点是企业陷入了自身经营模式的盲区，因而拒绝以挤占现有利润空间为代价进行创新。

    按照定义，颠覆性创新的意思是和之前存在的东西，也就是它所颠覆的东西相比，它的质量不那么高。IBM的大型计算机在运算方面当然比第一代个人电脑强（就像个人电脑的运算能力超过第一代上网本或平板电脑一样）；综合型钢铁企业可能比微型钢铁厂加工的东西多；实体药店的服务比邮购强。新的模式并不是对原有模式的改进，而是一种崭新的方法，一种——嗯——突破。在这种突破的冲击之下，原有的行为方式变得支离破碎。看到我所做的了吗？甚至都不需要用一个被用滥了的词。

    已经有人对今天的情况进行了精彩的预想：“在最糟糕的情况下，现代写作的主要内容不再是根据含义来选择词汇，也不再是通过文字描绘来更清楚地释义，而是把别人已经确定了次序的一些词语串拼接在一起，并通过这种纯粹的空话让写下来的语句看得过去。这种写作方式的吸引人之处在于它很容易。”这是乔治•奥韦尔在1946年发表的论文《政治和英语》（Politics and the English Language）中所做的论述。如今的局面与他的描述别无二致。

    对参加颠覆大会（Disrupt Conferences，科技博客网站TechCrunch已经多次举办这项会议），讨论颠覆性公共交通系统并就颠覆性公司撰写新闻稿的人来说，我提出的问题是：考虑一下你们在颠覆什么，用什么样的方式来颠覆，以及“颠覆”用在这里是否恰当。大多数情况下，它都没有用对地方。（财富中文网）

    译者：Charlie

    At a certain point -- somewhere on the way from sounding smart and buzzy to becoming an over-worn cliché -- a word loses its power. Disrupt is a good word we have mistreated terribly to the point it has become powerless. We've forgotten what it means, even as several smart people have written columns dedicated to reminding us about what it means, really, to disrupt an industry today.

    I will make this simple (not smart) and short (not long): a disruption is a breaking apart, or renting asunder, or falling to pieces. A disruption is a bad, unsettling, untidy thing.

    The more current use of the word, now warped into technobabble, was coined by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, whose book, The Innovator's Dilemma, considers how various "disruptive innovations" have upended different industries. (The book is totemic to Silicon Valley cognoscenti.) Surely you know all this, but still it bears repeating: In Christensen's book, disruption is -- if not bad -- certainly dangerous. The core of his argument is that companies fall victim to the blind spots in their business models and refuse to innovate in ways that would cannibalize their existing profit streams.

    Disruptive innovation is, by definition, not as "high-quality" as what existed before, what it's disrupting. IBM's (IBM) mainframes were certainly better at computing than the first PCs (just as PCs had more processing power than the first netbooks or tablets); integrated steel mills could process more than mini-mills; and retail pharmacies offered better service than mail order. What each new model represented wasn't an improvement on what came before it, but an entirely new approach, a -- ahem --break. And the break tore asunder the old way of doing things. See what I did there? No need to even use an already overused word.

    Someone has already brilliantly considered how it is we ended up here: "Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy." That's George Orwell, in Politics and the English Language, an essay he published in 1946. True today as it was then.

    My challenge for the people who attend Disrupt conferences (TechCrunch runs several) and talk about disrupting public transportation systems and send press releases about disruptive companies, is to consider what it is you are breaking, and how you are breaking it, and if in fact "disrupt" is the right word to use. Most of the time, it isn't.