A company stuck in the 90s searching for a future. Upper management continuosly talks about turning Intuit into a growth stock but cannot articulate a growth strategy beyond vague comparisons to tech leaders like Google, Apple and Facebook at every company event. While it is always good to look upwards for inspiration, none of the companies mentioned have anything in common with INTU.
Intuit is old school and has not mastered the web. Each new offering takes forever to be developed and marketed squandering opportunities again and again. Besides a few clumsy attempts and some noise regarding growth curves and inflection points, there is still no credible business strategy to offer profitable services in mobile platforms.
Corporate speak is pervasive. The company boasts a multi page glossary on its intranet of all the bizarre terms that are unique to Intuit and their meaning, and the list keeps growing. There are also innumerable management practices that are tied to a culture that pursues style instead of substance. It is more important to be know as a "team player" that talks the talk about values and leadership and parrots dilbert-like slogans instead of producing solid achievements.
There is also a lot of waste like at most large companies. This manifests itself in the pursuit of pet projects that add no value to the bottom line (for example the jingle generator) and are very costly.
While the company claims to treat the employees respectfully, it has not hesitated in laying off hundreds of people including highly senior individuals that will walk out the door with large chunks of the company's corporate memory. The layoffs have been largely sold as a move to bring fresh blood into Intuit but its credibility is low since the layoffs have not been followed by an organized strategic plan that will drive growth from new markets. No concerted effort was made to retrain, or retarget the people affected by the layoff. The layoffs came out on the same month when the huge upper management bonuses were issued. The rational for those inflated bonuses completely escape me.
A lot of people work in silos and do not take responsibility for things outside their direct sphere of action. Things that should be relatively simple are often delays by multiple days because everyone is passing the buck.
The company, to its credit, has attempted to establish internal innovation forums where employees can submit ideas. However, there does not seem to be any kind of filtering of those ideas. The end result is that all kinds of things get equal attention (a new application to "poke" your friends in Facebook with environmental advice) and very few, if any, represent ideas that will generate new business opportunities.
