The oil industry is a ...

The oil industry is a stunning example of how science, technology, and mass production can divert an entire group of companies from their main task. ... No oil company gets as excited about the customers in its own backyard as about the oil in the Sahara Desert. ... But the truth is, it seems to me, that the industry begins with the needs of the customer for its products. From that primal position its definition moves steadily back stream to areas of progressively lesser importance until it finally comes to rest at the search for oil.
 See image
 Theodore Levitt

Quotes from the same author

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.
 See image
 Theodore Levitt
Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.
 See image
 Theodore Levitt
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.
 See image
 Theodore Levitt
Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.
 See image
 Theodore Levitt
What is often lacking is not creativity in the idea-creating sense but innovation in the action-producing sense, i.e. putting ideas to work.
 See image
 Theodore Levitt