Top Highlights

• Successful innovators don’t just ask customers and clients to do something different; they ask them to become someone different.
• To succeed, Levitt maintained, “The entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating
• . In short, the organization must learn to think of itself not as producing goods or services but as buying customers, as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it.”
• Drucker. “Marketing and innovation produce results,” he observed. “All the rest are costs.”
• In effect, The Ask represents a managerial mash-up of Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia” manifesto and Drucker’s 1954 The Practice of Management declaration that “there is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer” [emphasis in original]. Drucker didn’t go far enough. The innovator’s ask explicitly addresses the kinds of custom...