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Who really said it

Last year over one million quarter-inch drills were sold, not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes

Not Clayton Christensen — actually Leo McGivena Leo McGivena 1896–1980 · New York adman; publicity manager of the Daily News
Disputed In copyright

This exact sentence is not Clayton Christensen’s. It is credited to advertising man Leo McGivena, and its earliest documented printing is Percy H. Whiting’s sales manual The Five Great Rules of Selling (McGraw-Hill, 1947), pages 39–40, which introduces it with the words “Leo McGivena wrote” (Quote Investigator ↗). Christensen’s own drill line was much shorter — “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” — and he credited Theodore Levitt, who had himself credited McGivena.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Last year over one million quarter-inch drills were sold, not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes” Not Clayton Christensen. This exact wording is credited to New York advertising man Leo McGivena and was printed in Percy H. Whiting's "The Five Great Rules of Selling" (McGraw-Hill, 1947), pp. 39–40, introduced with the words "Leo McGivena wrote." Christensen's own line, in Harvard Business Review (December 2005), was shorter — "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!" — and he credited Theodore Levitt, who in turn credited McGivena. — chronology via Quote Investigator

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Clayton Christensen. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by McGraw-Hill (Percy H. Whiting, The Five Great Rules of Selling, 1947); the estate of Leo McGivena for the underlying wording). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Leo McGivena — New York advertising man; publicity manager of the Daily News. Theme: "Last year over one million quarter-inch drills were sold, not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Last year over one million quarter-inch drills were sold, not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Earliest print of this wording
Percy H. Whiting, “The Five Great Rules of Selling” (McGraw-Hill, 1947), pp. 39–40
Credited there to
Leo McGivena, publicity manager of the New York “Daily News”
Earliest related version
Advertisement by insurance agent C. C. Wagner, “Somerset American” (Pennsylvania), 12 December 1942
What Christensen actually wrote
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” — Harvard Business Review, December 2005, crediting Theodore Levitt

Leo McGivena wrote: “Last year over one million quarter-inch drills were sold—not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes. When you buy an automobile you buy transportation. When you buy a mattress you are buying comfortable sleep. When you buy carbon paper you are buying copies.” Whiting, 1947 · pp. 39–40

As printed in Percy H. Whiting’s sales manual, which is where the wording is first documented. Quote Investigator ↗ reports this passage verified against scans held by the Rubenstein Rare Book Library at Duke University. The version that circulates today usually replaces the dash after “sold” with a comma and drops the three examples that followed.

Quote Investigator: the full drill-and-hole chronology

How we verified this

  • 1942 — the idea, before the wording: the earliest strong match Quote Investigator ↗ has found is a Provident Mutual advertisement placed by agent C. C. Wagner in the Somerset American of 12 December 1942, arguing that a million men who bought quarter-inch drills wanted quarter-inch holes. QI adds that it suspects the adage was already in circulation.
  • 1947 — the wording, with McGivena’s name on it: Percy H. Whiting’s The Five Great Rules of Selling ↗ prints the sentence at pages 39–40 and introduces it “Leo McGivena wrote.” This is the earliest documented appearance of the phrasing quoted here.
  • 1969 — Levitt hands it on, correctly: in The Marketing Mode ↗ (McGraw-Hill) Levitt wrote “Leo McGivena once said,” per QI ↗ — he never claimed it, and the Internet Archive record notes the 1974 second edition was retitled Marketing for Business Growth.
  • 2005 — Christensen inherits it: his Harvard Business Review article ↗ with Scott Cook and Taddy Hall used a shorter line and credited Levitt; Wikiquote’s Christensen page ↗ lists no drill-and-hole quotation among his own.
In copyright

The earliest documented printing of this wording is Percy H. Whiting’s “The Five Great Rules of Selling” ↗, published by McGraw-Hill in 1947 — well after the 1931 United States public-domain threshold — so the passage is treated as in copyright. Every later form is later still: Levitt’s 1969 book, Ziglar’s 1985 book and Christensen’s 2005 Harvard Business Review article all remain under their publishers’ rights.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Who really said it

This is a misattribution by inheritance. Each famous name in the chain quoted the man before him and said so — and each time the quotation marks got a little looser, until the sentence ended up filed under the most recent celebrity to say it out loud.

Clayton Christensen misattributed

Christensen used a drill-and-hole line, but a different and shorter one, in “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure” (Harvard Business Review, December 2005 ↗, with Scott Cook and Taddy Hall), and he introduced it as something Theodore Levitt “used to tell his students” — explicitly not his own (Quote Investigator ↗). The long “Last year over one million…” sentence quoted here is not his at all.

Theodore Levitt popularizer, not originator

Levitt opened The Marketing Mode (1969) with the saying and wrote “Leo McGivena once said” — a credit he repeated in the 1974 edition (QI ↗). Wikiquote ↗ nonetheless carries the short form as a Levitt quotation sourced only to a 2016 Christensen collection — a citation that runs through Christensen rather than back to anything Levitt wrote.

“Leo McGinneva” garbled credit

By his 1986 Marketing Imagination Levitt was crediting “Leo McGinneva’s famous clarification,” a misspelling recorded by Barry Popik ↗. A name spelled wrong in the standard citation is a name that does not survive being copied.

Zig Ziglar, and a run of insurance admen later restatements

Zig Ziglar’s 1985 version was its own wording — “Each year over 5 million quarter-inch drills are sold, yet it’s safe to say that nobody wants a quarter-inch drill” — and the idea was already running in life-insurance newspaper advertisements in 1942 and 1946, before any book claimed it (QI ↗).

Bottom line: the sentence as quoted belongs to adman Leo McGivena, first documented in Percy H. Whiting’s The Five Great Rules of Selling (1947); Christensen wrote a shorter line and credited Levitt, and Levitt credited McGivena (Quote Investigator ↗).

Context

Why the line keeps changing hands

The sentence survives because it does a whole marketing lecture in one image: nobody in the hardware aisle actually desires a piece of spinning steel, they desire a hole. The idea is old enough that Quote Investigator ↗ found insurance salesmen already deploying it in newspaper advertisements in 1942 and 1946, before any of the famous names now attached to it had published a word on marketing.

What makes the Christensen credit so sticky is that he genuinely did use a version of the line, at the top of a widely read Harvard Business Review article, and used it brilliantly — as the setup for his argument that firms measure market share of drills rather than of holes. Readers remembered the drill and forgot the footnote. He was quoting Levitt; Levitt was quoting McGivena; McGivena, so far as anyone has documented, was quoting nobody.

Christensen quoted Levitt. Levitt quoted McGivena. Only the drill made it all the way down.

Read the full chain of credits

1942 — the idea, unattributed. An advertisement placed by C. C. Wagner of the Provident Mutual Life Insurance Company in the Somerset American of Somerset, Pennsylvania, is the earliest strong match Quote Investigator has located: hardware stores report a million men bought quarter-inch drills, and not one of them wanted a drill. QI adds that it suspects the adage was already circulating.

1947 — the wording, with a name on it. Percy H. Whiting, who worked for the Dale Carnegie Institute, printed the sentence in The Five Great Rules of Selling and introduced it “Leo McGivena wrote.” This is the first documented appearance of the phrasing people quote today.

1969 and 1974 — Levitt passes it on. Theodore Levitt opened The Marketing Mode with the line and explicitly wrote “Leo McGivena once said.” He repeated the credit in the second edition, retitled Marketing for Business Growth. By his 1986 Marketing Imagination it had degraded to “Leo McGinneva” — a misspelling Barry Popik ↗ records, and a plausible reason the real name dropped out of circulation.

2005 — Christensen inherits it. In “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure,” written with Scott Cook and Taddy Hall, Christensen introduced the saying as something Levitt “used to tell his students.” From there it became, in popular retelling, Christensen’s own.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Purpose Wisdom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator — “No One Wants a Drill. What They Want Is the Hole”quoteinvestigator.com

The authoritative chronology, with the 1947 Whiting text verified against scans: 1942 Wagner ad, 1946 Hobbs ad, 1947 Whiting quoting McGivena, 1969 Levitt, 1985 Ziglar, 2005 Christensen.
Barry Popik — “Don’t sell drills—sell holes”barrypopik.com

Popik’s parallel research: the 1947 Whiting page-39 text, Levitt’s 1974 and 1986 restatements, the “McGinneva” misspelling, and McGivena’s dates (1896–1980).
Percy H. Whiting, “The Five Great Rules of Selling” (1947)archive.org

Internet Archive’s borrowable scan of the 1947 book in which this wording is first documented and credited to McGivena.
Theodore Levitt, “The Marketing Mode” (1969)archive.org

Internet Archive record of the McGraw-Hill volume in which Levitt used the saying and named McGivena; the record notes the 1974 second edition was retitled “Marketing for Business Growth.”
Christensen, Cook & Hall, “Marketing Malpractice” (HBR, Dec 2005)hbr.org

The article in which Christensen used his own shorter drill-and-hole line and credited it to Theodore Levitt.
Theodore Levitt — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Lists the short form as a Levitt quote sourced only to Christensen’s 2016 reader — a secondary citation, and the route by which the Levitt credit propagates.

The name behind the line

Leo McGivena

Leo McGivena

1896–1980 · New York advertising man; publicity manager of the Daily News

Leo McGivena was a New York advertising man who served as publicity manager of the Daily News, then the city’s biggest picture newspaper. Quote researcher Barry Popik gives his dates as 1896–1980 and notes simply that he “worked in advertising”; it is not known when or where he first wrote the drill-and-hole line, only that Percy H. Whiting quoted it under his name in 1947. He is the rare case of a man whose single most-repeated sentence outlived every record of his own career — Theodore Levitt eventually misspelled him “McGinneva” in print.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Whiting, The Five Great Rules of Selling (1947)

Percy H. Whiting, The Five Great Rules of Selling (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), 39–40, quoting Leo McGivena. Chronology and verification per Garson O’Toole, “Quote Origin: No One Wants a Drill. What They Want Is the Hole,” Quote Investigator, March 23, 2019, which reports the 1947 text verified against scans held by the Rubenstein Rare Book Library, Duke University.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Last year over one million quarter-inch drills were sold, not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/last-year-over-one-million-quarter-inch-drills-were-sold/

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