Intuit Founder Cook on Giving Big Business a Startup Brain Transplant

Can a nearly 30-year-old company be as nimble as a startup? It?s a question Intuit?s Scott Cook has been asking himself a lot lately. The company, which he founded in the early 1980?s, makes some of the world?s most popular personal and business financial software, including TurboTax, Quicken, QuickBooks and Mint, which it acquired in 2009.

As Cook, who now serves as Intuit?s chairman of the executive committee (Brad D. Smith is the company?s president and CEO), sees it this is the golden age of startups. ?We?re living in a fabless economy for startups, particularly software-based.? And those startups certainly have an advantage over older, larger and more established companies. At least when it comes to agility. Big businesses ? at 8,000 employees, Intuit qualifies as a big, established business ? are ?not known for game-changing, speedy, thinking out of the box or breaking paradigms,? Cook told Mashable.

?As a successful scaled company, you cannot run the ship the way you used to. You?ll get run over by a swarm of startups,? lamented Cook.

The obvious answer for Intuit and companies like it is to try and develop a startup mentality.

Getting there, isn?t easy. Big companies are not only hierarchy hives, they are extremely process-driven when it comes to decision making.

Big Ideas

Calcified decision trees hinder even the best ideas. ?Decisions by hierarchy are slower and backward looking,? said Cook. Business leaders believe their job is to make decisions, he explained, not get out of the way of new ideas.

When people talk about innovation and bringing unusual ideas to market, they often point to Google and its 20% time program, which allows employees to use one-fifth of their time on projects outside their normal responsibilities. Some of these crazy ideas become products. Google News and Gmail both started as 20% projects. Some of the best Google Doodles were built in 20% time.

Though Cook never mentioned Google by name he?s clearly a fan of the 20% idea. He warned, though, that if you allow 20% time or, as he likes to call it ?unstructured time? but the ?decisions are still made by guys in suits who still need PowerPoint? it?s not going to work.

To be like a startup, Cook contends, you not only have to allow for experimentation, you have to break down the decision-making process until it?s essentially gone. The transformation means that you go from allowing the boss to make the decision to data from the experiment driving the decision.

You?re ?moving decision making from the most powerful to the most inventive,? said Cook.

Fruits of the Labor

Intuit?s own unstructured time has already resulted in a number of consumer and regional products including a mobile business tool for farmers in India and the SnapTax iPhone App, which allows you to file 1040 EZ tax forms simply by taking a smartphone picture of your W2 form. The apps OCRs (reads the text), asks nine questions and then files the form. In the case of the former, it survived two attempts to kill the project and now nearly a million farmers use the product. In the case of the latter, a tiny three-person team was allowed to experiment over and over again until they got it right.

Cook readily admits that those working on their unstructured projects still have to get someone?s approval, but ?the goal is to eliminate the need to have someone sign off on the experiment.? They want to allow ideas and teams to flourish ?without the need for management to get involved,? said Cook.

Intuit?s so committed to the idea of startup-like innovation that another small, two-person team built and launched a proprietary in-house tool to collect, build and manage new ideas. Called, naturally, ?Brainstorm,? Cook described it as a mix of Facebook, Amazon reviews and blogs.

Any Intuit employee can add new ideas, which others comment on, debate and build upon. Brainstorm is also used to collect teams and resources for ideas. Intuit employees request volunteers with certain expertise and often get them.

Intuit is using these tools and unstructured time to go faster and act like a big ?network of startups.? Still, Cook does not believe startups have all the advantages. Despite the agile thinking, speed and lack of institutional decision-making, it can still be tough out there in the business world, even for the most nimble startup: ?The odds of success have not gone up,? warned Cook.

Intuit?s blueprint for big company success in a startup world sounds promising, but could it work for all large businesses? Some might say Microsoft is acting more like a startup these days and that Google?s startup agility is fading into a kind of arthritic tic. Apple is the antithesis of startup, with a tightly wound exec team still making the majority of major company decisions. So who has the startup mojo and who is losing it? Let?s talk about that and how you use or don?t use startup principles to win in your market sector in the comments below.

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