Idea 50 - What business are you really in? Every once in a corporate blue moon a truly revolutionary idea comes along, one that makes every thinking company look at what it is doing through a new pair of spectacles. And a vision corrective was exactly what Theodore Levitt offered managers with his scornful, provocative and hugely influential article 'Marketing myopia', when it appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1960. Its subject may have been marketing but, as much as anything, it was about strategy. There is surely not a business in the developed world that doesn't 'focus on the customer', or at least claim to. So it may be hard to remember, or conceive of, a time when that simply wasn't so. But that's just how it was at the start Of the 1960s, when Levitt chose to shake US industry by the scruff of its collective neck. He began by pointing out that every major industry was once a growth industry. Some still were, but had the spectre of ...