Theodore Levitt Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Theodore Levitt
Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

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

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

Theodore Levitt
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