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

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.

The fact that a consistendy highly creative person is generally irresponsible in the sense that we have used this term is in part predictable from what is known about the freewheeling fantasies of very young children.

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.

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

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

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.