The Black Lesbian Who Wowed HBS

INTUIT’S SCOTT COOK CONCEDES HE FAILED TO ATTEND HIS OWN HBS GRADUATION

Ogunwole noted she is moving to a new city in a new country to take on a new job at a new company. “I am building this constellation of newness upon graduation,” she told the crowd. “It’s daunting, but it’s also thrilling. and it’s the best way I know to challenge myself to embody the mission of HBS and my own value system.”

Cook also began his Class Day presentation by confessing that he had failed to show up for his own graduation from the Harvard Business School in 1976. “Right after finals,” he told the assembly, “I went right home to California. It just seemed too far and too expensive to come back for a day.”

Cook, who did stints at Bain & Co. and Procter & Gamble before co-founding the accounting and personal finance software company Intuit, then pulled out his smartphone and snapped to selfie with the crowd in the background. “There is a photo I have got to get for my mom,” he quipped, before explaining that he, too, was surprised by his acceptance to Harvard many years earlier. “Being on the board of advisors, we get to see the historic statistics on the school. The data shows that MBA admissions took a deep dive in the early ’70s. Applications dropped by almost a third in one year. Thank goodness. Now I know how I got in.”

‘WHAT I WISHED I KNEW WHEN I GRADUATED FROM HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL’

He then explained his path to bootstrapping Intuit and his own personal difficulty to grow the firm’s revenues. “Today I am going to cover one thing that I wished I knew when I graduated,” he said, “something I had not yet learned. Let me illustrate with a story. I was the CEO of Intuit for the first 11 years. By years nine and 10, as the company kept growing, increasingly I began to feel I was a little bit underwater, that the skills the company needed in its leader were skills I didn’t seem to have, the problems we needed to solve were ones I didn’t like and really wasn’t very good at. By year 10, it became clear to me I was holding the company back.”

Scott said he ultimately stepped down, helping to recruit a new leader in Bill Campbell, a former Apple executive, who did a “phenomenal job,” and was succeeded by current CEO Brad Smith. Intuit, Scott said, now has a market capitalization that is 40 times larger than when he ran the company. And the company’s marketshare varies between 60% and 95%.

“Still, I know that when I look back, I let the company down in my final years as CEO and I let myself down,” Cook said. “What I was unable to do is to grow my skills at the rate the company needed. I failed in my ability to develop myself, to grow and to change. I spent some time thinking about this and working on this problem. All of us are bundles of stuff, of biases and believes, of predilections and behaviors, some conscious and some not. For better and for worse, the best of those are our strengths. The rest of those are our weakenesses, our foibles, and worse.

‘YOU ARE AMONG THE MOST LUCKIEST PEOPLE ON THE PLANET’

“The good news is those bundles are not fixed. You can change…The tough part is the person we know least well is ourselves, or at least the one we have the hardest time seeing clearly. Richard Fineman was right when he said, ‘The easiest person to fool is yourself.’ It gets even worse in a position of leadership. The higher you go, the worse it is because your people are not telling you the truth. They are giving you a sugar-coated Pollyannaish view, and all the bad stuff you do, they grouse about you behind your back. They are not going to tell you.”

Cook then outlined three things he has done as a leader to offset those challenges: He proactively sought feedback from others, hired and listened to an executive coach, and learned to “savor” a surprise. The latter learning led to the company’s biggest success, its entry into the accounting software field for businesses.

BE PROACTIVE IN SEEKING FEEDBACK on everything you do, he said. “Don’t wait for someone else to do it once a year. Admittedly, this is not an easy process,” he explained, since “the natural instinct is to be defensive, but that stops the learning process.” The lessons that result are invaluable. For example, he said, about ten years ago, he gave a six-hour Powerpoint presentation to Intuit employees. When he later asked a number of them how they liked it, they replied that they had gained a lot more from another and much briefer presentation that included an experiential learning exercise. Cook said he took that lesson to heart in his future approach to management. Frequent feedback opportunities are now part of Intuit’s corporate culture.

FIND A CAREER COACH – a boss, a coworker, a mentor, a professional — someone who you know will tell you the truth. Years ago, for instance, Cook said he was bothered by the fact that he was the only person in the organization who didn’t have a performance review. He sought out a company coach and asked for a 360-degree review. By his own admission, the results were poor. “I had some bad habits that bothered people,” he said. “I went to colleagues and said, ‘This is what I’ve heard. I’m going to fix it. Please help me.’” As a result, Cook said he was able to improve his management methods and handle future challenges in a much more beneficial way.

SAVOR SURPRISES — something he learned from former HBS Dean Kim Clark. Intuit’s personal finance product, Quicken, served as a case in point. “Our research kept telling us that half our customers were using it in their businesses rather than at home. After several years, we finally visited with some of them and found—to our surprise–that they really were using the product to run the books of their small operations. Now, everyone will tell you that the only way to keep books in a business is with debits and credits. We had assumed that ourselves. But most people don’t know a debit from a credit and don’t want to learn. So we created QuickBooks, the first accounting software with no accounting in it. That business is now 50 percent of our business – all because we savored a surprise that I had resisted for years.”

Though he didn’t attend his HBS graduation, Cook said it was Professor Ben Shapiro, now an emeritus professor of marketing strategy, who said something during a final lecture that has stayed with him through the years. “He said, ‘You can choose. You are among the luckiest people on the planet. By virtue of where you are graduating from, you will have choices and options beyond most people’s dreams. You can choose what your life adds up to. You can choose the purpose of your work by the company you join. You can choose the values you stand for by the team you join. You can choose what purpose becomes your life. And I have never forgotten his words. You can choose.”

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