Theodore Levitt Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Theodore Levitt's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Economist Theodore Levitt's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 34 quotes on this page collected since March 1, 1925! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.

    Theodore Levitt (1986). “Marketing Imagination: New, Expanded Edition”, p.127, Simon and Schuster
  • Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

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

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

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

    Theodore Levitt (1986). “Marketing Imagination: New, Expanded Edition”, p.127, Simon and Schuster
  • Though progress starts with the imagination, only work can make things happen. And work itself works best when fueled, again by the imagination.

    Theodore Levitt (1986). “Marketing Imagination: New, Expanded Edition”, p.127, Simon and Schuster
  • 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 (1986). “Marketing Imagination: New, Expanded Edition”, p.135, Simon and Schuster
  • 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.

    "Marketing for business growth".
  • Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.

    Theodore Levitt (1974). “Marketing for business growth”, McGraw-Hill Companies
  • 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.

  • Anything in excess is a poison.

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

    Theodore Levitt (2008). “Marketing Myopia”, p.71, Harvard Business Press
  • 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.

  • Ideas are useless unless used.

    Theodore Levitt (1974). “Marketing for business growth”, McGraw-Hill Companies
  • Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.

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

    Mortimer Levitt, Theodore Levitt (1998). “Thinking About Management”, p.94, Simon and Schuster
  • 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 (1974). “Marketing for business growth”, McGraw-Hill Companies
  • Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film; they advertise memories.

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

  • 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.

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

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

    Mortimer Levitt, Theodore Levitt (1998). “Thinking About Management”, p.51, Simon and Schuster
  • Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

    Mortimer Levitt, Theodore Levitt (1998). “Thinking About Management”, p.64, Simon and Schuster
  • Creative people tend to pass the responsibility for getting down to brass tacks to others.

  • 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.

    People  
  • 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.

  • 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 (1974). “Marketing for business growth”, McGraw-Hill Companies
  • The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.

  • 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 (2008). “Marketing Myopia”, p.1, Harvard Business Press
Page 1 of 2
  • 1
  • 2
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 34 quotes from the Economist Theodore Levitt, starting from March 1, 1925! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Theodore Levitt quotes about: Business Creativity Imagination Innovation Progress Science