Profiles of Remarkable Businesses (Collection)

How Intuit Turned Feedback into a Comeback

The Editors of New Word City

For almost an hour, the 14 Canadian entrepreneurs—owners of businesses ranging from a bakery to a hip-hop clothing manufacturer—sat around a table venting about their problems. “Finding distribution channels,” they said, and “partnership and collaboration,” and “cutting costs,” and “the time suck of social media.”

Running the session in Toronto in October 2009 was a slight, professorial, 57-year-old Silicon Valley legend named Scott Cook. He had assembled the group because he wanted to hear their problems first-hand so that Intuit, the business he founded, could come up with ...