Theodore Levitt famous quotes

05-24-2025

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Change #Creativity #Thinking
People don't want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.
-- Theodore Levitt

#People #Deep Thought #Want
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Organization #People #Done
Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film; they advertise memories.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Photography #Memories #Film
Experience comes from what we have done. Wisdom comes from what we have done badly.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Done
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Views #People #Effort
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Change #Ideas #Innovation
Sustained success is largely a matter of focusing regularly on the right things and making a lot of uncelebrated little improvements every day.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Littles #Matter #Improvement
Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Ideas #Imagination #Progress
Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Business #Organization #People
Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Ideas #Useless #Action
A consistently highly creative person is generally irresponsible.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Creative #Be Creative #Persons
Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Ideas #Imagination
Ideas are useless unless used.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Ideas #Useless #Used
The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Purpose
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Creativity #Ideas #Creating
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Innovation #Today #Way
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Powerful #Business #Responsibility
Customers buy 1/4 holes, not 1/4 bits.
-- Theodore Levitt

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

#Simple #Thinking #Creative
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Growth #Marketing #Shadow
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Clever #Engineering #Wizardry
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Moving #Technology #Oil
Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Order #Organization #Innovation
A powerful force drives the world toward a converging commonality, and that force is technology. â€¦ Almost everyone everywhere wants all the things they have heard about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Powerful #Technology #World
You want to dig your well where you have the best chance of finding water with the least amount of digging
-- Theodore Levitt

#Water #Want #Digging
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.
-- Theodore Levitt

#Business #Creative #Advice

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