“This is the biggest thing I’ve learned about business,” says Scott Cook. “It’s changed how we innovate.”
Cook, the founder of Intuit, spoke at the Economist‘s Ideas Economy conference yesterday. Cook, who also serves on the boards of directors at eBay and Proctor & Gamble, sat down with Fast Company to offer his personal insights on the topic of human potential.
Cook began by echoing an earlier discussion from the conference: Human potential in the U.S. has waned. According to recent surveys, about 70% of American workers are not engaged: 20% are actively disengaged, and 50% are not particularly committed. Cook has spent years narrowing down the cause of this lack of engagement, and developing a solution.
“You’ve seen these people–the people who say: The boss doesn’t get it. The company doesn’t get it,” Cook explains. “They know how to fix it. They have ideas, but no one cares, and no one allows them to try what they think is right. It’s crushing to the human spirit and potential.”
He recommends allowing your workers to experiment, and make their goal to please the customer–not the boss.
“The way to put human potential on steroids is rapid experimentation,” he says. “Got an idea? Okay, what are the hypotheses underpinning that idea, and how can we rapidly test one or more of them? It stops the boss from being the judge–it ends that thumbs-up thumbs-down Caesar approach. Let the customer be the judge.”
