Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Theodore Levitt Passes Away

Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Theodore Levitt, a great doyen of the field of marketing and former editor of Harvard Business Review passed away on Wednesday, June 28 at his home in Belmont, Mass., after a long illness. He was 81 years old.

The man behind concepts such as “Marketing Myopia” and "Globalization", he was one of the towering personalities in the study and practice of Marketing. His article “Marketing Myopia" published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) in 1960 is perhaps one of the all-time great classics of HBR.

The key question that all managers must be able to answer, he advised, is “What business are you in?” The railroads, for example, “let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business instead of the transportation business,” he wrote.

That most basic but powerful question in the article really was the beginning of many a strategic re-evaluations for some big businesses in history.

Read all about the great man in a wonderful eulogy on the Harvard Business School website here.