Levitt, Renowned Business Prof, Dies

For Michael G. Berolzheimer ’61, meeting with Professor Theodore Levitt kindled business ideas.

On a rainy Sunday afternoon in the 1960s, Berolzheimer sat with Levitt, who died last week at the age of 81, in front of the fireplace of his former professor and friend to discuss the direction he should take his family-owned California Cedar Products Company.

The eminent author of the article “Marketing Myopia” advised Berolzheimer to build a brand, pay attention to quality, and manage his new business separately from his historical family business. That brand became the Duraflame fireplace log.

“Ted had a wonderful way of taking different ideas and bringing them together into a conceptual framework,” Berolzheimer said yesterday in an interview.

Levitt will be remembered by the world as the man who coined the word “globalization,” but for his former students, his colleagues, and his loved ones, he was above all a man who could bestow down-to-earth advice as well as ground-breaking theory.

“It was just good advice—wisdom,” said Berolzheimer about his fireside chat with Levitt. “It wasn’t necessarily earth-shattering.”

He met Levitt as a student in his marketing class in his first year at Harvard Business School, whose faculty Levitt joined in 1959.

“He was able to bring an enormous excitement into the classroom,” said Berolzheimer, a 1963 HBS grad. He had an “intellectual playfulness which some people didn’t see as very playful if he was directing attention at someone trying to come up with an answer. Some people found him very tough.”

“Dinner discussions were a lot I think like his classrooms in that he loved to debate issues, argue about issues of the day,” said Professor Levitt’s son, Peter Levitt. “His interests really went across the gamut.”

Berolzheimer said that Levitt also expected his students to be prepared. Berolzheimer remembers at least one time when he walked out of a class when a student he called upon was not prepared to participate in class discussion.

But Berolzheimer said that Levitt always used humor to relieve tension in class.

According to a press release from HBS, Levitt “favored a theatrical style in class, striding up and down the aisles and tossing chalk toward both blackboards and students.”

Berolzheimer remembered Levitt throwing chalk whenever he wanted students’ attention, but also when he wanted students to think unconventionally. “To me his throwing chalk became a symbol of ‘let’s use our imagination,’” he said.

Levitt called upon companies to expand their marketing conceptions in his 1960 Harvard Business Review article “Marketing Myopia,” which eventually became one of the best-selling HBR articles of all time.

“In truth, there is no such thing as a growth industry,” he wrote. “Industries that assume themselves to be riding some automatic growth escalator invariably descend into stagnation.”

In other words, the danger that a company in a “growth industry” falls into is not considering how the introduction of new businesses affects that company’s success, and in defining its market as one based on the product and not on the customers’ needs.

In 1983, Levitt coined the term “globalization” in his HBR article “The Globalization of Markets,” where he described the need to have a common, consistent product when marketing worldwide.

“The globalization of markets is at hand,” he wrote. “The global corporation operates with resolute constancy—at low relative cost—as if the entire world (or major regions of it) were a single entity; it sells the same things in the same way everywhere.”

Four of the 25 articles Levitt wrote for HBR garnered McKinsey awards, which are awarded annually to the review’s top two articles. He also wrote or co-wrote eight books about business and marketing. His works are standard required reading in business school courses.

Other awards Levitt won include the John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business Journalism in 1969 and the George Gallup Award for Marketing Excellence in 1976.

Peter Levitt said that he will remember his father’s energy in all aspects of his life.

“Everything he did both in business, academics and in his personal life he did with total enthusiasm,” Peter Levitt said.

A reception for family, friends, colleagues, and former students will be held today at 4 p.m. at the Belmont Hill Club, 825 Concord Ave., in Belmont.

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.