The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and Expanded Edition)

2

The Measure of Success

Scott Cook was worried. His financial-software company, Intuit, was on a slippery slope, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it.

Granted, his problems might not have looked overwhelming to an outsider. Intuit had grown like gangbusters ever since its birth in 1983. Its three major products—Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax—dominated their markets. The company had gone public in 1993, and by the end of the decade was racking up sizable profits. Intuit had also been lauded by the business press as an icon of customer service, and Cook—a mild-mannered, bespectacled Harvard MBA who had done a stint at Procter & Gamble before cofounding the company—had a gut-level grasp of the importance of customer promoters. “We have hundreds ...