Are You Disruptive?

So I’m reading this article, “Forget Your Elevator Pitch — What’s Your Dumbwaiter Pitch?” from someone with the Harvard Business Review.

The crux of the article speaks to the need to have a one word pitch (the Dumbwaiter Pitch) at the ready to describe your company as opposed to the traditional elevator pitch, which the author describes as “predictable, often vapid, always bland.”

By contrast the author refers to the Dumbwaiter Pitch as something that “strips an organization right down to its bones, and see how compelling it really is.”

While I won’t get into whether or not I agree with the author (I don’t) I was intrigued immediately by one line in the piece that read…

“Nearly every disruptive business, in fact, has a Dumbwaiter Pitch…”

The word “disruptive” immediately caught my eye.

See, I am “disruptive” by nature… disruptive not in the breaking mom’s china manner, but rather questioning the accepted norms. Or as Howard Jones would put it, “challenging preconceived ideas.”

So, my question is… Are you disruptive in a positive way?

Is your business disruptive, in a positive way?

Do you go along with the flow adhering to the “ain’t broke, don’t fix” mantra or do you purposely break something to see if perhaps there’s a better way of doing whatever it is you broke?