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

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.

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.

A product is not a product unless it sells. Otherwise it is merely a museum piece.

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.

The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.

Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.