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

Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.

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.

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

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others that are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.

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 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.