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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

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Theodore Levitt
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: May 1
Died: 2006
Died: June 28
Economist
University Teacher
Needs
Creative
Infinitely
Much
Getting
Concrete
Process
Essentially
Difficult
Failed
Easy
Abstract
Vigorously
Business
Generally
Advocates
Today
Advice
Distinguish
Need
Trouble
Relatively

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Anything in excess is a poison.
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Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.
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People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want to buy a quarter-inch hole!
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Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
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Sustained success is largely a matter of focusing regularly on the right things and making a lot of uncelebrated little improvements every day.
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Experience comes from what we have done. Wisdom comes from what we have done badly.
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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.
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Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.
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Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine.
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