Years of Poems and Spirits

I was awestruck after reading Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia. I thought MBA was all about Tom Peters, Peter Drucker and so on. Reading Levitt’s essay certainly help to make me feel better of my choice. Anyway, great article.

He breaks down a convoluted management issue into two simple categories: production and marketing. Or what we do best versus what customers want most. What Levitt tells me is that these two are not always in sync. Instead, it is at one’s peril to focus on production only (aka too much focus on JIT, zero inventory, etc.). How he read Henry Ford shows the two are the two sides of one dialectic process. Ford said he set a price that he knew would move sales and he was certain the cost would fall in line afterwards. Of course, how Ford did it was not as important as how he thought about it.

Wonderful read.