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immediate advantage, but in either case the advantage you or the competition gain will be temporary and provisional.
    Want to know why and how that has become a fact of life? More important, want to know how to flip that fact to your advantage? Keep reading.
    GOING, GOING, GONE: THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
    A friend of mine had a successful business in Sydney, manufacturing point-of-sale materials and displays out of perspex.Walk into a shoe store looking for Nikes or Reeboks anywhere in Australia, or even a consumer electronics store looking for a new camera, and you would likely find a product in that store made by my mate. At least that was the case a decade or so ago.
    He had a good thing going by anybody's standards. Then one day everything started to change. Perspex made in China trickled, and then flooded, into the market.
    As I sat with him having a coffee in his office toward the end of this tumultuous period, he said to me, 'Peter, I just don't get it.What am I doing wrong?'
    He probably meant it as a rhetorical question. But I stood up and walked to the wall behind him where he pinned up family photos, Far Side cartoons, inspirational quotes and that kind of jazz. Holding pride of place in the middle was a piece of traditional workplace humour, a sign that said in block capital letters, 'FAST, GOOD, CHEAP – PICK 2.'
    My friend thought the sign was funny, but it also expressed a business philosophy that had served him well over the years. Perfection's not possible, and as Mick Jagger sang, you can't always get what you want. If you try hard, you can get what you need, so long as you don't ask for too much.
    I took a red marker, crossed out the '2' and replaced it with a '3'. That was my way of saying, 'Getting what you need is yesterday. Today is getting what you want. And too much is never enough.'
    My friend had built his business by making good-quality products and responding promptly to his customers' needs.
    Compared to the Chinese imports, his products were not cheap, but he thought he had a quality advantage and could match anyone on efficiency and speed of delivery (at least initially anyway). As it turns out, many of my friend's customers thought his quality advantage was superfluous. The Chinese goods were more than well enough made to last through their normal span of use in a fast-changing sales environment, where customers are eager for the next new thing and merchandisers replace their displays and point-ofsale materials frequently.
    Behind my friend's wrong assumption about his quality advantage was a mistake about time and the pace of market change. It was two mistakes, really. One mistake was thinking the greater durability of his product was actually an advantage for most of his customers, rather than being increasingly irrelevant given how fast market trends change. The second mistake was in thinking he was a fast enough manufacturer and supplier to hold his market share on that score. The Chinese manufacturers turned out to be much faster than he was as well as much cheaper, and were good enough on quality to rapidly erode his market share. Not only that, but over time the Chinese imports arguably began to match the quality he once built his market position on.
    My friend's mistake wasn't unusual. It was business as usual. The standard advice in business textbooks is that you can't lead your league on fast, good and cheap, so you should concentrate your efforts to excel and establish competitive advantage in one category, be average or good in a second category and don't worry too much about lagging in the third category.
    But remember, today's customers increasingly 'Think AND, Not OR'. In a world of global oversupply, global underdemand and nonstop technological change, they get more of what they want faster and faster all the time. In the case of some of the most profitable businesses of our time (think of successful product launches such as the Apple iPod, Nintendo