Scott Cook And Intuit

By Author: STEPHANIE
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There are at least three reasons you should know Scott Cook, and one reason you probably don't. And it's the last one that might be most important.

Cook is the founder of Intuit, the company that brought you the personal and business financial tools Quicken and QuickBooks—and as Intuit's CEO for the better part of 20 years, since its launch in 1983, he built the company into a $1.7 billion enterprise. He should be more famous than he is. Not just for the fact of Intuit's success, but for how Cook achieved it and what his particular entrepreneurial journey represents. Not to mention the ways his company's creations have changed how so many of us manage our financial lives.

In 1983, when he took his start-up leap, Cook was already ahead of two curves. No corporate outsider, he was a Harvard M. B. A. , a former Procter & Gamble brand manager, and a onetime3 Bain consultant. He was, though only, a business pro—a forerunner in a trend that would later be labeled the "professionalization" of Tag-Heuer Carrera Replica ...
... entrepreneurship. He wasn't riding a wave, he was pushing through the water ahead of it.

If Intuit's growth can be attributed to any one managerial practice, it would be the now tired cliché about listening to your customers. Is there a smarter, simpler, cheaper, or more telling 6 example of the practice than Intuit's "Follow Me Home" program? It called for an Intuit employee to hang around the local computer store until someone bought Quicken off the shelf. The employee would then ask the buyer to take him home so he could see how difficult the product was to install. He would watch the process silently, noting everything from how easily the shrink-wrap came off to which lines of direction bred8 that confused look on the new user's face. If there were problems, the fault was Intuit's, Cook insisted, not the customer's. Every pause, every source of frustration , were evidence of something Intuit needed to fix. Cook was a radical simplifier. He knew, right from the start, that Intuit didn't need only to make Quicken better and easier than every other software program; it needed to make Quicken better and easier than the pen in your hand and the paper check-writing process that Quicken aimed to replace. And Cook knew that if he and his company could just be alert" and creative and open-minded enough, then making it so was possible, because would-be customers could tell them how.

He was right. So right, in fact, that during Intuit's second decade, Cook says, customers " invented our mid-market business before we even saw the possibility. " Entrepreneurs had begun using Quicken to run the finances of their companies. When Intuit finally caught on, it listened again and created QuickBooks, a business finance program that now accounts for 15% of the company's sales. And here's where it can be argued that the impact of Cook's work has been exponentially greater than merely what's reflected in the billion-dollar business he's built — that by pioneering the tools that made financial management possible for so many individuals and company builders, he and Intuit taught an entire country important things about business, and for many people made entrepreneurship itself possible, too.

For all those reasons you should already know Scott Cook better than you do, but the reason you don't is more meaningful. It's his carriage13, his peculiar self-effacement14, and what that leads to. It would be hard to find another brilliant man who's more unprepossessing15 than Cook. It's not possible that Cook is ego-less ; he's too self-confident, has accomplished too much, is too secure in his convictions16. But the impression he makes today isn't any different from the one he made when I first met him in 1 988-a time proximate Tag Heuer Replica enough to one of Intuit's early near-deaths that potential failure was still a character in the room. Cook remains the slightly owlish, professorial guy he was, still looking papery and wind-carved. He speaks with the same gentle precision, thinking before talking, never the loudest voice. And in conversation he still listens unlike any leader I have ever seen. Listening, he seems to forget himself. He seems composed of pure curiosity. He's like a man who al-ways expects that the next thing someone — anyone — tells him might be the most surprising and enlightening thing he's heard. He listens without blinking. He learns.