This is, of course, true, but it subtly confuses the meaning of what is
meant, or what should be meant, by "sustaintable competitive advantage."
There's a difference between "sustainable" and "unassailable"--or even
"sustained." No advantage of any sort is impregnable, and I don't think
impregnability is implied by people who argue that this or that management
technique or philosophy will help create "sustainable" advantages. As I
read the literature, it argues that an agile, learning organization will
be more able to sustain competitive advantage because it is more able to
move to new ground, higher ground, adopt or adapt or invent new
technologies, find new channels, abandon its previous redoubts. That is,
it argues that the only sustainabile competititve advantage is found by
creating an organization that does not depend on today's advantage,
because it can quickly see and exploit tomorrow's.
Can that be done forever? Probably not, since organizations and people hit
rough patches. But there are companies that have stayed in the forefront
of their industries for a long, long time: Merck, Rubbermaid, Procter &
Gamble, JP Morgan, Northwestern Mutual Life, Johnson & Johnson, DuPont,
UPS, 3M, for example. Note how many of these--Rubbermaid and 3M famously,
but all of them, really--have dramatically changed what they sell or how
they sell it. 3M gets 30% of its sales from products that are less than 5
years old, which means that it reinvents itself with great frequency--I
can't do the math, but someone can. The shipping business UPS is in today
is radically different from the one it was in back when--but it still runs
the tightest ship.
Obviously, these companies have created a competitive advantage that they
have sustained for a long time, which it seems to me would justify the
phrase "sustainable competitive advantage.". Just as obviously, the
advantage does not consist of a catalogue of products and services--those
fade away.
The sustainable advantage, therefore, seems to derive from not having to
sustain any one particular advantage. Which might account for the semantic
confusion.
-- Tom Stewart Fortune ThosStew@aol.com