Top 28 Theodore Levitt Quotes
#1. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine.
Theodore Levitt
#6. 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
#7. Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.
Theodore Levitt
#8. You want to dig your well where you have the best chance of finding water with the least amount of digging
Theodore Levitt
#10. 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.
Theodore Levitt
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill
Theodore Levitt
#14. Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.
Theodore Levitt
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
Theodore Levitt
#19. Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.
Theodore Levitt
#20. Creative people tend to pass the responsibility for getting down to brass tacks to others.
Theodore Levitt
#21. 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
#22. A product is not a product unless it sells. Otherwise it is merely a museum piece.
Theodore Levitt
#23. Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film; they advertise memories.
Theodore Levitt
#24. People don't want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.
Theodore Levitt
#25. The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.
Theodore Levitt
#26. A consistently highly creative person is generally irresponsible.
Theodore Levitt
#27. Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.
Theodore Levitt
#28. Experience comes from what we have done. Wisdom comes from what we have done badly.
Theodore Levitt
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