Sudden Impact

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The Outsider
Steve Bennett, president and CEO, Intuit Corp.
Even during the Internet Golden Age, Silicon Valley's siren song was just background noise for Steve Bennett. It wasn't that he didn't get job offers. As executive vice president of GE Capital, his phone number, like those of most of Jack Welch's top lieutenants, was on speed dial at the big search firms. But Bennett loved GE: He had spent his entire 23-year career there. Welch had rewarded him with a variety of promotions, underscoring one particularly upbeat review with a 40% raise.

Then, on November 29, 1999, Bennett got a call that changed everything. Intuit, the software outfit famous for Quicken, TurboTax, and QuickBooks, was looking for a CEO. The requirements: the ability to run a multibusiness company, a track record for growth, a talent for innovation, and the skills to lead an organization that is obsessively devoted to its people. Bennett was intrigued. "I thought that I would learn more in this job than I would ever have the chance to learn if I stayed at GE," he says. "Plus, I wanted to prove that I was more than a one-trick pony."

Running Intuit would take a whole stable of tricks. Scott Cook had founded the company in 1983 and guided it through its first decade. In 1994, he hired Bill Campbell to take the reins and steer Intuit through its growth years. But once the company's revenue neared $1 billion and the product line became more diverse, Cook knew that he needed someone with significantly different skills to lead the company into the $10 billion club. Intuit was good -- its products had extraordinary share, and its customers were loyal -- but it had hit the wall at the $900 million mark.

Besides lacking operational rigor, Intuit was missing opportunities for growth. It had focused so relentlessly on its core customers -- businesses with fewer than 20 people -- that it had failed to keep pace with customers who had outgrown its software or who had specialized needs that the current product line didn't satisfy. "When a company does something that it's good at and gets good results, it tends to get stuck in a rut," says Cook. "The world had moved ahead, yet we had not changed our mind-set. I was having a frustrating time trying to make that change happen."

On Friday, January 21, Bennett accepted the job, sold his GE stock, and walked out the door. By Saturday, he was on a plane to California. He spent Sunday in press training, debuted as the new CEO on Monday, and bought a house in the Valley -- on the spot, in the dark -- that night.

Bennett proved equally resolute in his first weeks and months at Intuit. While he had never led a company outside of GE, he had run a variety of business units over the course of two decades and had refined a plan for taking on new challenges. By the time he arrived at Intuit's campus in Mountain View, he had, for example, already amassed a vast amount of information about the company and how it worked. "The interview process is where you start," he says. "That's where you ask all of the questions about what it takes to be successful: How do you set objectives? What's the business management - review process? How do you do budgets? Who makes decisions? Which functions are strong?"

No sooner was Bennett in the door than he hit the road, touring Intuit's major sites and testing against reality the hypotheses that he had formed during interviews. In 30 days, he visited a dozen locations and talked to hundreds of people, gathering feedback and insight on what was right -- and wrong -- with the firm's operations.

What he found was an organization with a democratic, employee-centric culture -- a place where managers could choose whatever PC suited them, no matter what other business units were using; where meetings happened simply because nobody had the nerve to say, "This is a waste of time"; and where one group owned a product's development, and another owned its sales support. "We were focused too much on making sure that everybody felt good and not enough on high performance," says Bennett.

Intuit managers, he felt, had bought into an almost folkloric belief in false paradoxes -- you could be either innovative and entrepreneurial or rigorous and strategic, fast or cost conscious, customer driven or disciplined -- and it had infected how they ran their own organization. "I wanted them to know that a company can be focused on high performance and still be a good place to work," he says.