Theodore Levitt: Quotes about business

Theodore Levitt was American economist and professor at Harvard Business School. Explore interesting quotes on business.

Theodore Levitt: 16 quotes1 like

“Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things. The difference speaks for itself. Yet the fluent advisers to business seldom make the distinction. They tend to rate ideas more by their novelty than by their practicability.”

Theodore Levitt

Theodore Levitt (1974). Marketing for business growth, p. 71

“I do not mean that selling is ignored. Far from it. But selling, again, is not marketing. As already pointed out, selling concerns it 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 invariably does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse, and satisfy customer needs. The customer is somebody "out there" who, with proper cunning, can be separated from his loose change.”

Theodore Levitt

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 19

“In business, the followers are the customers. To produce these customers, the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer satisfying organism. Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny of the organization.”

Theodore Levitt

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 20-21

“The business of business is profits.”

Theodore Levitt

Source: The Dangers of Social Responsibility (Levitt, 1958).