One should not focus on the differences between people but look for commonality and similarity.

Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.

People don't want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.

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 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.

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.

Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.

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

Sustained success is largely a matter of focusing regularly on the right things and making a lot of uncelebrated little improvements every day.

In spite of the extraordinary outpouring of totally and partially new products and new ways of doing things that we are witnessing today, by far the greatest flow of newness is not innovation at all. Rather, it is imitation.

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.

Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.

A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action.

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

Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

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.

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

An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill.

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