Strategy Driven

MARCH 30, 2011

The marketing orientation focuses the purpose of the firm towards serving customer needs profitably – an orientation supported by the late greats Peter Drucker and Theodore Levitt. Evaluating the willingness to pay of millions of customers requires the development of a new corporate capability. These are two very simple concepts.

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Price Strategy Discount Levitt 50

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 3, 2011

In January 1980, Harvard's Ted Levitt wrote an article titled " Marketing Success Through Differentiation of Anything." Levitt argued that products were more complicated to consumers than most manufacturers considered. By providing its customers with the same product, Apple actually developed the most social product on the market.

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Levitt Succession Wireless Franchising 16

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 29, 2011

Some fifteen years ago, in a period that seemed full of change and uncertainty in marketing, I asked my colleague Ted Levitt where he saw our field heading. Levitt, who had a marvelous talent for speaking in epigrams, responded, "The future of marketing will be more like its past than anyone imagines."

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Levitt Marketing Uncertainty Price 16

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 26, 2014

A recent story in the New York Times highlighted a pair of high school students who had experienced considerable success as app developers. Unfortunately, app development came at the expense of schoolwork, resulting in a sharp decline in one developer’s grades as the pair headed into the college application season. Hear me out.

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Development Levitt Real Estate IPO 12

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 13, 2014

In 1960, marketing legend Ted Levitt provided perhaps his seminal contribution to the Harvard Business Review : “ Marketing Myopia.” To avoid that, Levitt exhorted leaders to ask themselves the seemingly obvious question – “What business are you really in?”

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Levitt Christensen Competitive Advantage Welch 15

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Levitt and Dubner, they of Freakonomics, offer a slightly more sophomoric example when they point out that the "average" adult in a global sample has one breast and one testicle. Still, companies often make the mistake of developing products and features to appeal to the mean.

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Disaggregation Levitt Analysis Short-term 16

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 11, 2012

Reading has a host of benefits for those who wish to occupy positions of leadership and develop into more relaxed, empathetic, and well-rounded people. It serves as a great introduction to other works by modern writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Levitt, who translate theories from the social and physical sciences into everyday life.

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Books Cialdini Christensen Collins 22

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 11, 2012

Reading has a host of benefits for those who wish to occupy positions of leadership and develop into more relaxed, empathetic, and well-rounded people. It serves as a great introduction to other works by modern writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Levitt, who translate theories from the social and physical sciences into everyday life.

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Books Cialdini Christensen Collins 21

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 21, 2014

Decades ago, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt popularized the rationale behind why people buy quarter-inch drill bits: “People don’t want quarter-inch bits. Technology advancements are quickly outpacing traditional use cases, making the design and development of meaningful products harder than ever. They want quarter-inch holes.”

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Levitt Early Adopters Products Productivity 10

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 18, 2016

In 1960, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt published a landmark paper in Harvard Business Review that urged executives to adapt by asking themselves, “What business are we really in?” These companies succeeded not because they were faster, but because they developed products that were demonstrably better than their competitors.

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Company Levitt Succession Agility 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 6, 2014

The classic example, attributed to HBS professor Ted Levitt, is that people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want something that will make a quarter-inch hole. Briefly, the idea is this: Consumers don’t go to the store to buy products. Making a quarter-inch hole is the job to be done.

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Disruptive Innovation Levitt Innovation Tools 14

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 7, 2015

Large numbers of developers responded, and some offered immensely popular applications such as Printicular from MEA Labs , which allows users to print photos at Walgreens from either their phones or their accounts with Facebook, Instagram, or Dropbox. Growth strategy Product development Business models Internet' Insight Center.

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Levitt Real Estate Business Model Early Adopters 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 12, 2013

The approach echoes Ted Levitt''s famous comment about selling ¼ inch holes rather than ¼ inch electric drills, and advocates a mindset shift away from selling products to "doing jobs" that solve customers'' problems. This then allows the development of specific solutions for each segment.

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Ramaswamy Levitt Prahalad Christensen 10

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 26, 2015

With apologies to Ted Levitt , a new “Marketing Myopia 2.0” Their managements increasingly have to play the odds: What is more likely to get a better and safer return on investment — a really talented software development team in Bangalore, Bogata, or Cambridge? The unhappy innovation inference? ” has emerged.

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Disruptive Innovation Levitt Tourism Incentives 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

As Ted Levitt pointed out 55 years ago, companies develop significant myopia over time, only seeing things that are squarely in the mainstream of their market. Sometimes the place to look is in physical locations where consumption was historically difficult if not impossible.

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Disruptive Innovation Christensen Levitt Innovation 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 19, 2015

In much the same way, Edison and his circle developed and sold electric household appliances like the clothes iron to create demand for electricity during the daytime: they were leveraging the system they invented to create new product categories that in turn increased demand for their system in the first place.

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Strategy Levitt Energy System 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 26, 2016

Sales was traditionally seen as a form of service work, with an emphasis primarily on developing moral character. But effective training and development should begin with awareness and shelf space in the curriculum: making sure that sales is a topic in management education worthy of the name. That’s a big topic in its own right.

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Education Levitt Retail Training 8

N2Growth Blog

OCTOBER 7, 2010

Steve Levitt - Author of Freakanomics and Super Freakanomics , Steve was superb. I love creative thinkers and her presentation focused like a laser beam on creativity of thought and approach. My favorite thought by Renee was: “ Success rests on pushing the creativity frontier.

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