Theodore Levitt quotes:

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

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

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

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

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.

Ideas are useless unless used.

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

Customers buy 1/4 holes, not 1/4 bits.

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.

Anything in excess is a poison.

In spite of the extraordinary outpouring of totally and partially new products and new ways of doing things that we are witnessing today, by far the greatest flow of newness is not innovation at all. Rather, it is imitation.

One should not focus on the differences between people but look for commonality and similarity.

Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

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

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

A consistently highly creative person is generally irresponsible.

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.

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

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

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others that are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.

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

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

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.

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

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want to buy a quarter-inch hole!

People don't want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.

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.

The oil industry is a stunning example of how science, technology, and mass production can divert an entire group of companies from their main task. ... No oil company gets as excited about the customers in its own backyard as about the oil in the Sahara Desert. ... But the truth is, it seems to me, that the industry begins with the needs of the customer for its products. From that primal position its definition moves steadily back stream to areas of progressively lesser importance until it finally comes to rest at the search for oil.

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.

The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.

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

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.

You want to dig your well where you have the best chance of finding water with the least amount of digging