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

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

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.

Anything in excess is a poison.

Ideation is not a synonym for innovation, conformity is not its simple antonym, and innovation is not the automatic consequence of "creative thinking.".

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 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.