"Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation"
About this Quote
A novelist declaring what business is for is already a provocation: Milan Kundera smuggles a theory of capitalism into a sentence built like a guillotine. “Only two functions” isn’t managerial advice so much as a refusal of the usual corporate self-mythology. Finance, operations, HR, “strategy,” governance - all the bureaucratic furniture - are demoted to housekeeping. What remains are the two acts that actually face the world: marketing (the story you tell to be chosen) and innovation (the change you make to deserve being chosen).
The subtext is Kundera-esque in its suspicion of systems that confuse motion with meaning. Marketing becomes the realm of seduction, rhetoric, and taste-making - the curated self. Innovation is the counterweight: the stubborn intrusion of reality, the new thing that can’t be spun into existence. Put together, they mirror a central modern tension: performance versus substance, image versus invention. Kundera’s edge is that he treats both as equally constitutive. The product doesn’t “speak for itself”; it’s spoken into culture. The story, meanwhile, can’t float forever without something novel to anchor it.
Context matters: Kundera lived through regimes that weaponized slogans and punished deviation. Read through that experience, the line carries a warning. Marketing without innovation is propaganda; innovation without marketing is silence. The sentence works because it’s reductive in a way that exposes how often institutions hide behind complexity to avoid the blunt question: are you creating something new, and can you persuade anyone it matters?
The subtext is Kundera-esque in its suspicion of systems that confuse motion with meaning. Marketing becomes the realm of seduction, rhetoric, and taste-making - the curated self. Innovation is the counterweight: the stubborn intrusion of reality, the new thing that can’t be spun into existence. Put together, they mirror a central modern tension: performance versus substance, image versus invention. Kundera’s edge is that he treats both as equally constitutive. The product doesn’t “speak for itself”; it’s spoken into culture. The story, meanwhile, can’t float forever without something novel to anchor it.
Context matters: Kundera lived through regimes that weaponized slogans and punished deviation. Read through that experience, the line carries a warning. Marketing without innovation is propaganda; innovation without marketing is silence. The sentence works because it’s reductive in a way that exposes how often institutions hide behind complexity to avoid the blunt question: are you creating something new, and can you persuade anyone it matters?
Quote Details
| Topic | Marketing |
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