The Innovator's Method

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The Innovator’s Method

How do we turn Intuit into an eight-thousand-person start-up? That’s what we are trying to do.

—Brad Smith, CEO, Intuit

IN 2008, INTUIT celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and named Brad Smith as CEO. Founded by Scott Cook, Intuit—maker of successful financial software packages like Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax—had achieved remarkable success, growing revenues to more than $3 billion and creating a market value of $10.2 billion. But Cook and Smith were worried. Intuit had seemingly reached a performance plateau, and its market value had begun to fall. Annual revenue growth had dropped in half, from 15 percent (1998–2003) to 8 percent (2004–2008), and annual income growth had slowed even more dramatically, from ...