The Marketing Imagination (1986)
Theodore Levitt

"Excellent quality is not enough. Also required is suitability. In pursuit of wrong purposes, excellence is wrong. Employing gas spectroscopy is overkill when a simple microscope will accomplish the task. Using a simulation model to determine the optimal warehouse network may be excellent management science, but you'll realize it's ridiculous if you just stop to think. Common sense will suggest that you'll need a warehouse in the New York metropolitan area, probably one between Washington and Philadelphia, one around Atlanta, around Chicago, around Houston-Dallas, in Los Angeles-San Francisco, in the Pacific Northwest, and somewhere on a line between Denver and Minneapolis. How much scientific accuracy do you need? Your imagination can tell you in a moment a great deal more than scientific excellence would have told you at great expense and pretension in a year" (pages xvii-xviii).

"...the explanations of the superior performance that we commonly get from the most successful practitioners of capitalist enterprise, though perhaps quite accurate in themselves, are seldom more than confessions of particular experiences, offering no comparison with the experiences of others and devoid of serious analytical content. What they lack, moreover, in generality they often compensate with pomposity" (page 5).