Theodore Levitt Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Anything in excess is a poison.

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

Ideas are useless unless used.

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