It has been more than a quarter century now since Theodore Levitt, the Harvard marketing professor, outlined a few simple statements about the requisites of competitive success. Levitt's statements are as true (perhaps even more so) today as they were back in 1983 when his book, The Marketing Imagination, became a business best-seller. Here, again, is what Professor Levitt outlined in simple, powerful terms:

• "The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.
• To do that you have to produce and deliver goods and services that people want and value at prices and under conditions that are reasonably attractive relative to those offered by others to a proportion of customers large enough to make those prices and conditions possible.
• To continue to do that, the enterprise must produce revenue in excess of costs in sufficient quantity and with sufficient regularity to attract and hold investors in the enterprise, and must keep at least abreast and sometimes ahead of competitive offerings.
• No enterprise, no matter how small, can do any of this by mere instinct or accident. It has to clarify its purposes, strategies, and plans, and the larger the enterprise the greater the necessity that these be clearly written down, clearly communicated, and frequently reviewed by the senior members of the enterprise.
• In all cases there must be an appropriate system of rewards, audits, and controls to assure that what's intended gets properly done and, when not, that it gets quickly rectified.
• Not so long ago a lot of companies assumed something quite different about the purpose of a business. They said quite simply that the purpose is to make money. But that proved as vacuous as saying that the purpose of life is to eat. Eating is a requisite, not a purpose of life."