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.

Though progress starts with the imagination, only work can make things happen. And work itself works best when fueled, again by the imagination.

Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film; they advertise memories.

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.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want to buy a quarter-inch hole!

Creative people tend to pass the responsibility for getting down to brass tacks to others.