THEODORE LEVITT

Globalization

Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariable does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.

Sustained success is largely a matter of focusing regularly on the right things and making a lot of uncelebrated little improvements every day.

Ideas are useless unless used.

A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action.

Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine.

Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

Experience comes from what we have done. Wisdom comes from what we have done badly.

Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.

The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going.

The trouble with much of the advice business is getting today about the need to be more vigorously creative is, essentially, that its advocates have generally failed to distinguish between the relatively easy process of being creative in the abstract and the infinitely more difficult process of being innovationist in the concrete.

Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.

A powerful force drives the world toward a converging commonality, and that force is technology. … Almost everyone everywhere wants all the things they have heard about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies.

All organizations are hierarchical. At each level people serve under those above them. An organization is therefore a structured institution. If it is not structured, it is a mob. Mobs do not get things done, they destroy things.

What is often lacking is not creativity in the idea-creating sense but innovation in the action-producing sense, i.e. putting ideas to work.

Creative people tend to pass the responsibility for getting down to brass tacks to others.

Ideation is not a synonym for innovation, conformity is not its simple antonym, and innovation is not the automatic consequence of "creative thinking.".

The fact that a consistendy highly creative person is generally irresponsible in the sense that we have used this term is in part predictable from what is known about the freewheeling fantasies of very young children.

An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill

Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film; they advertise memories.

A product is not a product unless it sells. Otherwise it is merely a museum piece.

Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.

Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

Though progress starts with the imagination, only work can make things happen. And work itself works best when fueled, again by the imagination.