In the CEO Afterlife

JULY 2, 2013

Many years ago I read Theodore Levitt’s The Marketing Imagination. Branding Leadership Marketing Strategy Advertising Consurmer Packaged Goods Social Media Theodore Levitt Vision In the book, the renowned marketing professor said there was no such thing as a commodity, only people who think like commodities. Suddenly, a light went on in the corner of my mind. After that, as a matter of principle, I stopped using the “C” word. This served me well as a branded coffee marketer.

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Marketing Levitt CEO Telecommunications 257

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 4, 2021

The actor, writer, and director discusses the role mindfulness plays in his art and how he leads his team. Psychology Mental health Wellness Audio

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Levitt Gordon Team Review 12

Joseph Lalonde

MARCH 14, 2018

Michael Levitt, CEO of BreakfastLeadership.com. Becoming A Healthy Leader There are plenty of ways to become a healthy leader. I’ve shared various ways you can become a healthy leader over the last couple of weeks. Today, I wanted to bring new voices to the civanonversation on what a healthy leader looks like. To do this, I reached out to leaders I admire and respect. Photo by Element5 Digital.

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Levitt Armstrong Succession Morale 316

First Friday Book Synopsis

JUNE 8, 2014

Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner William Morrow/An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers (2014) How and why mastering the economic approach will produce better answers to questions and better solutions to problems In their latest book, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner cite […]. Levitt The Book The conventional wisdom is often wrong The Gambler Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Van Halen group William Morrow/An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Zappos

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Review Books Levitt Incentives 100

First Friday Book Synopsis

NOVEMBER 26, 2014

Karl Ronn is the managing director of Innovation Portfolio Partners. Based in Palo Alto, he helps Fortune 500 companies create new businesses or helps entrepreneurs start category creating new companies. He is a co-founder of VC-backed Butterfly Health that sells Butterfly body liners nationally. He is also developing a software company building diagnostic competency for […].

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Levitt Books Kotter Software 99

First Friday Book Synopsis

MAY 16, 2013

Revised and Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World Theodore Levitt HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing HBR Editors and various contributors Harvard Busxiness Review Press (2013) How the right strategy can help create or increase demand for whatever is offered This is one in a series of volumes that anthologizes what the editors of the Harvard Business Review consider to be the “must reads” […].

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Marketing Levitt Books Christensen 93

First Friday Book Synopsis

MARCH 4, 2011

The Marketing Imagination (Expanded Edition) Theodore Levitt Free Press (1986) Do not be misled by the date of this Expanded Edition: Of the more than 27 gazillion books on marketing now in print, none has had a greater impact than has this one. It is truly a masterpiece. By way of background, in 1960 (in [.].

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Marketing EVA Review Levitt 80

First Friday Book Synopsis

APRIL 30, 2011

Alan M. Webber is an award-winning, nationally-recognized editor, author, and columnist. In 1995, he launched Fast Company magazine, a fresh, dynamic entry in the business magazine category. Headquartered in Boston, MA, the magazine became the fastest growing, most successful business magazine in history. Fast Company won two national magazine awards—one for general excellence, one for [.]. Bob's blog entries "Business As War" "global detective” Alan M.

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Edvinsson Levitt Books Taylorism 103

First Friday Book Synopsis

SEPTEMBER 15, 2011

Thursday September 15th, 2011: The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs today announced the shortlist for the seventh annual Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (www.ft.com/bookaward), which aims to identify the book providing the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues. The shortlist is: [.].

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Levitt Books Energy Finance 89

First Friday Book Synopsis

OCTOBER 3, 2011

Rust Scott Cook Suj Krishnaswamy Susan Fournier Taddy Hall The Marketing Imagination Theodore LevittHarvard Business Review on Reinventing Your Marketing Various Contributors Harvard Business Review Press (2011) How to use innovative thinking to improve how you create or increase demand for what you offer Those who aspire to maximize the impact of their marketing initiatives will find the material in this HBR book invaluable. It is one of [.].

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Review Marketing Aaker Levitt 70

First Friday Book Synopsis

MARCH 2, 2011

Martin Seth Godin Steve Jobs Steve Steinhilber strategic alliances The Complete Guide to Mergers and Acquisitions The Effective Executive Execution The Executive’s Compass The Marketing Imagination The Opposable Mind Theodore Levitt Thomas Edison Thomas Watson Sr.

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Books Mintzberg Levitt Charan 85

Strategy Driven

JUNE 6, 2013

Levitt and. Levitt and Stephen J. Evaluation & Control Program Recommended Resources book review business book business management evaluation and control freakonomics Stephen Dubner Steven Levitt strategydriven Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. by Steven D. Stephen J. Dubner. About the Book. Freakonomics by Steven D.

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Resources Strategy Incentives Analysis 50

N2Growth Blog

APRIL 29, 2021

Innovation is doing new things.” – Theodore Levitt. We are witnessing the creation of an entirely new paradigm, a fierce wave of technological innovation boosting generations of new businesses and business leaders.

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Technology Innovation Levitt Decentralization 269

Great Leadership By Dan

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

My friend Michelle Miller-Levitt was on the panel. Guest post by Roger L. Firestien, PhD : I’d bet you a hundred dollars that you don’t get your best ideas at work. Most people in my seminars and classes tell me that they get their best ideas while driving a car, exercising, taking a bath or shower, or as they fall asleep at night. At work, most of us are in implementation mode. Action mode. Make-it-happen mode.

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Incubator Levitt Power Leadership 217

Lead Change Blog

JANUARY 28, 2019

” These words of Harvard professor and marketing guru Ted Levitt were written about customers. He was the CEO of one of the most innovative service companies on the planet. I asked him to write an endorsement for my new book, and used the encounter to learn more about how he created such an amazing culture. He did not hesitate with his answer: “Trust!”.

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Innovation Levitt Blog Objective 254

In the CEO Afterlife

AUGUST 5, 2015

In Theodore Levitt’s The Marketing Imagination , the renowned marketing professor said there was no such thing as a commodity, only people who think like commodities. Differentiation is still the name of the marketing game. Distinction in service, image and promise allows a brand to occupy a piece of a customer’s busy mind. More importantly, differentiation is the brand’s raison d’être, its reason for being that causes customers to think of it when they are ready to shop.

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CEO Levitt Airlines Human Resources 157

Lead Change Blog

APRIL 1, 2016

” The books Chip has found most helpful for his professional life include Watership Down by Richard Adams, Marketing for Business Growth by Ted Levitt, and The Purple Cow by Seth Godin.

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Levitt Godin Airlines Blog 162

The Practical Leader

MARCH 25, 2020

When Nobel Laureate, Michael Levitt, first analyzed Chinese infection rates, he tracked an increase of 30% per day in Hubei province. As Heather and I work from, and stay home, to be part of the solution, I found myself gorging on way too much negative news. As my sleep and mood deteriorated, I went looking for an antidote to the pessimism plague. I began a search for reasons to be optimistic. One of the first articles I came across was at Human Progress by Chelsea Follott.

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Crisis Levitt Sharpe Peer Review 89

CEO Blog

NOVEMBER 11, 2010

View my complete profile Previous Posts The First 30 Days as CEO The Laws of Charisma Jim's Longevity Diet Broth The Next Level Book Review The Intangibles of Leadership Conscientious Equity Book Report Nando Parrado and James Cameron Blue Ocean Strategy Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Al Gore Steven Levitt - Freakonomics Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site.

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CEO Blue Ocean Strategy Levitt Blog 189

LDRLB

AUGUST 13, 2012

A team of economic researchers led by Harvard University’s Roland Fryer (and including Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame) recently flipped the incentive model on its head and tested on one of the most incentive-resistant professions in America: schoolteachers. Incentives have been with us for a long time. As a tool drive performance, there is nearly 100 years of solid argument for their use in organizations. More recently, however, their use has been called into question.

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Incentives Creativity Levitt Drucker 133

Reality-Based Leadership

DECEMBER 13, 2016

Levitt and Stephen J. The holidays are almost here and you may be scrambling to find a last minute gift for those on your list, or simply anticipating a bit of a break where you can rest, enjoy family, and rejuvenate yourself for the new year. Why not share the gift of a great book – or take the time to read one for yourself. Go ahead, you deserve it!

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Cialdini Levitt Books Collins 40

Mills Scofield

APRIL 15, 2012

Saul quotes Theodore Levitt (Harvard Business School Professor), “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” Quick, tell me your organization’s business model. Can you? Can you tell me what a business model is? Oh, it’s how we make money! Therein lies the problem. It’s a lot more than just making money – making money is the output, not even the outcome, let alone the model.

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Kaplan Business Model Levitt Christensen 151

HR Digest

APRIL 3, 2021

Brian Levitt, global market strategist at Invesco, said the report was “confirmation of what we all were starting to pick up on some months ago, which was that the economy is accelerating and the vaccine rollout is a game-changer”.

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Levitt Bond Construction Globalization 48

N2Growth Blog

OCTOBER 7, 2010

Steve Levitt - Author of Freakanomics and Super Freakanomics , Steve was superb.

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Blog Mauborgne Blue Ocean Strategy Collins 353

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 22, 2016

The term was coined by the late Harvard Business School marketing professor, Theodore Levitt, in a 1960 article by the same name (republished in 2004). The “heart of the article,” according to Deighton, is Levitt’s argument that companies are too focused on producing goods or services and don’t spend enough time understanding what customers want or need. ” As Levitt used to tell his students, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill.

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Levitt Transportation Industry Review 9

Harvard Business Review

JULY 11, 2011

It's hard to overestimate the influence Ted Levitt's "Marketing Myopia" has had on the world of marketing and beyond. Like Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence in literary criticism or Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things in product design, Levitt's half-century-old treatise on examining what business your company is really in hovers over and continues to influence entire schools of thought. This post is part of the HBR Insight Center Marketing That Works.

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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. Levitt asserted that companies could differentiate themselves — to a limited degree — by providing a variety of expected features to the consumer (i.e.,

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Levitt Franchising Wireless Christensen 15

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. Our understanding of pricing has come a long way since 1890 when Alfred Marshall published his treatise on the economic scissors of supply and demand. Pricing is no longer a purely economic challenge to be addressed through studies of market elasticity.

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Price Discount Levitt Strategy 50

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." Today, as the internet, social media, new analytics, and mobile devices upend the work of marketing, it may seem strange to say he was right.

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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?” Levitt agreed, noting that the trouble starts when over time companies come to define themselves not by what they do for customers but by the products they sell or the categories in which they compete.

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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?” Which brings us to something else Theodore Levitt said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” Jennifer Maravillas for HBR.

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Levitt Agility Incubator Review 12

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 1, 2011

Maybe it's a good time to dredge up a chestnut from Ted Levitt's classic HBR article, "Marketing Myopia." Levitt analyzed the fall of the railroads, and notes that the railroads "assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. Charles Dickens was killing it in 1842.

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Levitt Simon Mass Marketing eBook 15

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 16, 2012

There certainly is no shortage of candidates from our nine decades of publishing — from Ted Levitt's "Marketing Myopia" to Michael Porter's "How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy.". Harvard Business Review was launched precisely 90 years ago this month with an ambitious agenda — to produce a "business theory," based on rigorous research, to help managers run their companies more effectively.

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Levitt Porter Metrics Review 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 10, 2011

In their hit book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner posit that real estate agents don't have the incentive to push for the highest sales price for homeowners. Levitt and Dubner bolster their claim by citing research that reveals when realtors sell their own homes, they remain on the market one week longer and sell for 3% more.

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Levitt Real Estate Price Incentives 14

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 13, 2012

In 1960, the editor of the Harvard Business Review, Theodore Levitt, wrote that the failure of railroads could be explained in part by the myopic view that they were in the railroad business and not the transportation business, which left them vulnerable to competition from cars, trucks, and planes. Levitt argued that it's always better to define a business by what consumers want than by what a company can produce. What Business Are We In?

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Harvard Business Review

MAY 5, 2016

Grove’s 1980 question remains as ruthlessly relevant to C-suites as Ted Levitt’s 1960 classic, “What business are you in?” So contemporary versions of these boardroom queries by Grove, Moore, and Levitt sound almost accusatory: How could we create twice as much value for twice as many customers with only half as many employees?

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Levitt Disaggregation Kaizen Gordon 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 11, 2017

Theodore Levitt's classic theory -- in under two minutes. Dave Wheeler for HBR. The starting point of most competitive analysis is a question: Who is your competition? That’s because most companies view their competition as another brand, product, or service. But smart leaders and organizations go broader. The question is not who your competition is but what it is.

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Levitt Real Estate PR Review 13

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. There's no such thing as an average customer. A Harvard Business School marketing professor named John Deighton once came up with a vivid analogy to illustrate this and show why a business should sub-segment its customer base.

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Disaggregation Levitt Analysis Sample 15

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 13, 2017

Theodore Levitt's classic theory -- in under two minutes. Twenty five years ago Steve Hughes, now the CEO of Sunrise Strategic Partners, was walking through an orange juice plant when he had an epiphany that turned into a $500 million business. Hughes had just become executive vice-president of Tropicana, and he was touring facilities to try to learn about the business. He was in a plant and noticed some of the workers on a break.

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Levitt Video Review Brand 10

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 14, 2017

The late economist and marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” Most data-driven healthcare IT (HCIT) providers aren’t going to survive. Their business models are at serious risk of failure in the next three to five years. To beat those odds, they need to evolve dramatically, and fast, to a point where they are not selling data at all.

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Levitt Pharmaceuticals Competitive Advantage Insurance 9

Harvard Business Review

JULY 26, 2018

More generally, the results affirm that applying behavioral insights has great potential for increasing economic and individual well-being at low cost, as the recent work of Daniel Kahneman, Steven Levitt, Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, and others has shown. Ryan McVay/Getty Images. With U.S. household credit card debt at an all-time high of more than $1 trillion , delinquent payments can be more costly than ever.

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Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 11, 2012

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. Recently, I wrote that leaders should be readers. 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. One of the most common follow-up questions was, "Ok, so what should I read?". That's a tough question.

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Cialdini Christensen Collins Levitt 20

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

Consider another example made famous in Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. Upton Sinclair once wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon him not understanding it." If your business objectives aren't linked to employee compensation, it sends a strong message that they aren't a real priority, and motivation is adversely affected. The flip-side, however, isn't true.

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Levitt Letter Objective Business Objectives 15