Source: The Wall Street Journal Online (12 April 2007).

Thanks to my friend E. for passing this along to me.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal Online published the content of an interview with Intuit CEO Steve Bennett. Bennett and I both joined Intuit in 2000. During my four years at the company, I was consistently impressed with its internal dedication to customer-driven innovation without the sacrifice of financial and operational rigor. The heart and soul of Intuit’s innovation is founder and Chairman Scott Cook. The rigor comes from Bennett and his GE roots.

The Journal article, including the capsule above, speaks to Bennett’s management philosophy. (See “After GE: Intuit’s Steve Bennett on why some General Electric alumni succeed — and some don’t“). Two concepts from the article caught my attention in particular:

(1) Process and Rigor v. Innovation

I’ve always been fascinated by Bennett’s application of GE practices to Intuit, a mature company striving to innovate. More broadly, I’ve been interested in understanding how best to reconcile process, rigor and innovation during various stages of a company’s development.

Intuit, with its QuickBooks, TurboTax and Quicken franchises now mature offerings, focuses on deep customer insight to inform product improvements, product line extensions and new products, and the company takes an ordered, rigorous approach to this process.

Compare eBay, around half the age of Intuit, and arguably much less structured in its approach to innovation. As eBay matures and faces revenue growth and margin pressures, the company is going through the challenging process of deciding how deliberate to be with its innovation and how “corporate” in its operating processes. A recent International Herald Tribune article, for example, describes eBay’s co-location of engineers and business as an effort to “break patterns” of previous operation in functional silos.

(2) Customer-driven v. Technology-driven Innovation

Tip #1 from the capsule above is potentially provocative these days in the Valley. The Valley is peopled with both business and technology folk, sometimes in the same individuals and sometimes distinct. Where two camps exist and respect between them is lacking, religious debates tend to arise around how to approach problems and who is creating value.

The present renaissance of technology startups features a mix of companies trying to solve customer pain points with technology and technologies in search of business or consumer applications. Arguably, the Valley is filled with successful businesses that started from opposite ends of this spectrum, and the success of technology-driven companies that later found compelling customer applications seems to defy Bennett’s wisdom. The difference may be in genesis v. sustainability: It might be entirely feasible to start a company based purely on technology, but the road to sustainable growth may depend more on a lasting customer-oriented mindset.