Young people often ask me for advice about succeeding as they enter adulthood. It’s an insightful question, but I’m always reminded of the old joke, “why do adults ask young people what they want to be when they get older? Answer- because adults are still looking for a good answer ourselves!”. Once the surreal moment that I’m being asked a question about success subsides, I accept that there may be some value in the mistakes I’ve made and the experiences I’ve lived. To frame my response, I try to answer by thinking about what I know now, and what I wish I had known when I was 22. While the world has dramatically changed since “my day”, I believe some things have withstood the test of time, and remain worth considering for those trying to find their place in the world.

If I could whisper in the ear of my 22-year-old self, here’s what I’d share:

It’s not about me. It’s about we.

Be ready to combine your strengths and overcome weaknesses to solve issues together. Life is a team sport, and a player who makes the team great is far more valuable than simply a great player. Successful individuals play for a cause greater than themselves, and never for individual achievement. Working together, teams and great team players create the best outcomes.

Always be a learner:

It’s more important to have a high Curiosity Quotient, or CQ, than a high IQ. We all remain a work-in-process. I encourage tomorrow’s leaders to fall in love with the problem, and not their own solution. To achieve this, be curious enough to seek inspiration from outside. This can be achieved by asking yourself three questions: (1) Who has solved a similar problem outside our industry or company, and what can I learn from their experience? (2) Who has attempted to solve this problem in our industry or company, and what can I learn from them? (3) What are at least three ideas I have considered before selecting my final recommendation, and can I explain to others why I believe this is the best solution? Then lean in and accept the reality that both failure and success offer a chance to learn. As Anatole France once said, “I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom”.

Volunteer for the job that no one else wants:

By taking on the most difficult and unwanted assignments, you’ll stretch yourself and grow more than staying within your comfort zone. Every company has something that no one wants to do. Stepping up makes you stand out from others and builds your reputation as the invaluable go-to person.

Technology alone will not provide all the answers. It starts with people — and it’s important for millennials — and the rest of us as well — to realize that the biggest victories belong to those who see the value of “we” more than “me.”

This post was originally shared on LinkedIn on 7/7/16

Three Things I Wish I Knew at 22 was originally published in Intuit Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I speak with employees or students, I often get asked, “how do I make the right career choice?” My first response is always to lighten the mood by answering with a joke I once heard — “why do adults ask younger people what they want to be when they grow up? Because we are still looking for a good answer ourselves!”

The truth is — finding the right company and job is not clear cut, and comes down to your personal True North. For some, the choice is clear; but more often than not, it’s complicated and difficult. Fear and doubt seep in that the wrong decision can have long term effects, and many elect to “play not to lose, versus playing to win”. If you’ve ever felt that way, you are not alone. Honestly, these decisions are some of the toughest to make and are difficult for almost everyone.

When facing my first difficult job decision upon graduating college, my parents sat me down and taught me some valuable lessons about how they thought about career choices. Their advice has guided me in my own life, and I now pass these three tips on to others faced with similar choices:

Choose a company that fits with your values

My dad taught me to first choose the franchise, before you worry about your title. Said another way, rank the company over your level or role. Your job, title, manager and salary will change over the course of your employment at a company — but their values will not. Whatever your personal core values are, make sure they align with those of the company or organization you decide to work for. You will not only be happier day-to-day, but you will be more successful in the long term as well.

Choose a job where you’re surrounded by people smarter than yourself

When choosing a job, consider the team you’ll be joining. Never be discouraged by team members that are smarter than you. This will ensure that you are constantly learning, and in the long run that will make you a better version of yourself, leading to more success. I have been blessed in this regard, because it has never been hard to surround myself with people smarter than me!

Choose what makes your heart beat the fastest

We all have aspects of our lives that fill us with more passion and joy than others. If you take the time to reflect on those aspects, and can find a way to infuse what you love into your job, it won’t feel like work. Consider the types of things in your daily life that bring you the most excitement, and look for those qualities when evaluating job opportunities. For me, my inspiration came when I received my black belt in Tae Kwon Do as a teenager, and my performance evaluations moved from not only measuring the growth of my own skills and capabilities, to how my students’ capabilities were growing and advancing as well. That taught me how much I valued investing in others, which led me to management. So whether it’s winning as a part of a team, or creating things with your own hands in solitude, seek roles that contain those opportunities. There are no right or wrong answers, there are only personal passions to be pursued!

One final thought is careers are like roller coasters. There are definitely ups and downs. Early in my career, I left a company I loved for another company because they offered me more responsibility and a higher salary. In hindsight, I realized the culture didn’t match my values as well, and the company wasn’t as focused on leadership development, which I was passionate about. I was reminded of the lesson my parents had tried to teach me — to choose the franchise over the role. The good news is that those mistakes can be corrected. So pursue your personal True North, because it will enable you to be the best version of yourself, and create opportunities for you to make your greatest contributions.

This post was originally shared on LinkedIn on 5/17/16

To paraphrase a quote by investor and author Ben Horowitz, nothing prepares you for running a company, except actually running a company.

I certainly found that to be true when I became CEO of Intuit. No one was more surprised than I was to get the job. I loved the prior job and boss I had at the time, and becoming the CEO was not something I had explicitly aspired to achieve. When my predecessor stepped down and the board made the offer, I was both surprised and humbled, but quickly realized that it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

While it’s true that nothing really prepares you for running an organization, the hard-won lessons from your own previous experiences, combined with the wisdom from others who have come before you, can shed some light on what lies ahead. With that in mind, here are three things I needed to learn and do differently when becoming a CEO that were different from my previous roles. My hope is that in some small way, my experiences (and my mistakes) may be helpful if you are about to assume, or if you aspire to take on a similar role someday.

Planning for the Future

One major difference between running a product team or business unit and leading a company or major organization is the time horizon you must consider. When leading business units, I was expected to develop 3 to 5 year plans, supported by an annual operating plan or budget. When I became CEO, I quickly learned that my responsibility shifted to ensuring the company was “built to last”, with time horizons that were much more future-oriented, supported by scenario planning and a range of hypothesis-driven strategies designed to capitalize on emerging trends and opportunities.

The practicality of this lesson became clear to me early in my tenure as CEO through an exercise I experienced at a leadership conference. The exercise first required each of us to reflect on a decision or a strategy we now wish our predecessors had executed differently 10 years earlier, that would have left us in a better position today as a company. Everyone had a field day with this portion of the exercise, quickly identifying the “would have, could have, and should haves.” Oh, the benefit of hindsight is a magnificent thing!

It was the second part of the exercise that brought the lesson home. We were then asked to fast-forward 10 years and think about what our successors might wish we had done differently today to make the company stronger and their lives easier 10 years from now. That shifted my perspective and made me realize that as CEO, things were now different. Beyond the short-term goals of delivering business results, and even the 3–5 year plans, came the responsibility to consider the longer-term implications of everything I was doing today. The effect it would have on the culture, on our geographic footprint, on our technology and product foundation, on our brand and our customer loyalty. Make no mistake, elements of these considerations should be present in decisions at every level in the organization, but none more tangible or consequential than I’ve experienced as CEO.

Operating at the Right Altitude

A second major adjustment I needed to make when becoming CEO was getting used to the change in altitude. I grew up in operating roles, and always loved the immediacy and the intensity of dynamic shifts and real-time adjustments. You’re “in the field,” making real-time decisions that have immediate impact on business results.

As much as I loved being close to the front line action, I learned as a CEO that my new role required me to make long-term decisions that impacted business results over long periods of time and required me to view the entire landscape from a 30,000-foot view.

I often remarked that the difference between operational roles and the role of CEO is akin to the difference between a battlefield general and a Pentagon General.

In the interest of complete transparency, I didn’t grasp this concept initially, and in my first year as CEO I found myself straying into decisions and offering recommendations that were more appropriate for the leaders closer to the action. It was disempowering to the local leaders, and not where I could and should have been adding value. It took me time to adjust, but I came to realize that my new job was to ask the right questions that empowered our leaders to move forward with greater clarity about the “outcome” we sought. Said more succinctly, be clear about the “what” and delegate “the how”.

Taking on the Psychological Responsibility

The third major adjustment, and perhaps most surprising, was a realization that nothing in business could have prepared me for. The closest experience I’ve had in this regard was the day I became a father. As CEO, I had underestimated the depth of psychological responsibility you feel for every human being that is a part of the company or organization, including the customers who buy your products.

Our longtime chairman of the board at Intuit, Bill Campbell, best expressed this to me. As CEO, he once told me, “you’re going to tuck 8,000 employees into bed with you each and every night, and if you’re doing your job correctly, you’re going to think about how each and every one of them is feeling.” Even though I have always felt accountable to my teams, and have worked hard to be a servant leader throughout my career, the depth of the feeling as a CEO was exponentially more than I had anticipated. My job is to serve our 8,000 employees, our millions of customers and partners, and our shareholders. I work for them.

Being able to serve as a CEO is a wonderful opportunity for anyone, but it doesn’t come with instructions. Learning from the experiences of others, in addition to our own hard-won experiences makes it an energizing experience each and every day. It has been a vertical learning curve, and has indeed been the most humbling and rewarding experience of my professional career!

This post was originally shared on LinkedIn on 5/31/16

“Your title makes you a manager, people decide if you’re a leader.” Not only is this one of my favorite quotes, it is also my personal philosophy on leadership. We all have the potential to be leaders. It has nothing to do with our title or whether we manage people, and everything to do with how we approach the world and impact the lives of people we interact with.

I’ve had the privilege of learning from many exceptional leaders throughout my life and career, and I have found that great leadership shares five common characteristics:

Thinking Strategically

At its basic level, possessing the ability to think end-to-end and over multiple time horizons. Strategic thinking is a game of chess, not checkers. It can be tempting for leaders to spend too much time focusing on the day-to-day because it seems more urgent, but if you’re able to anticipate what’s coming down the road, you’ll thrive in today’s uncertain environment and better position your teams for success.

Results Oriented

Leadership is not just about thinking, it’s also about doing. In the end, it’s all about results. A wise leader once told me, “Strategies alone don’t move mountains. Bulldozers do.” The best leaders remove barriers and focus on creating an environment where great ideas can come to life — and strategy can make the leap from an aspiration to reality.

Build Strong Teams

Leadership is not about individual contribution, but rather the ability to translate individual ability into organizational capability. Great leaders always play for a cause greater than oneself — and in order to be a successful leader, they attract, grow and empower top talent. The role of leaders is to provide the grand challenge, invest in people and create an environment where their greatness can emerge.

Adapt and Improve

In today’s world, the pace of change has never been faster. Great leaders are constantly adapting to the ever-changing world, and turning adaptability and change management into a core capability for their teams. The best leaders thrive and get excited about becoming a better version of themselves, and your organization has to share that same mindset.

Inspire

Lastly, great leaders inspire both the heart and the mind, enabling people to do extraordinary things. The best leaders bring a unique blend of emotional quotient (EQ) with their intellectual quotient (IQ). As human beings, we often don’t care what you know, until we know that you care. Great leaders stretch their teams intellectually, while investing in them emotionally.

There are many things leaders need to possess, but based on those I admire, and the lessons I’ve learned, if you do these five things, people will consider you a leader — regardless of the title you carry.

This post was originally shared on LinkedIn on 11/9/15

Five Keys to Being a Great Leader was originally published in Intuit Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The role of CEO, like most leadership jobs, is multi-faceted and engaging, no matter the size of the organization. The most effective leaders I admire share that early in their careers, they learned the importance of hiring top talent and creating an environment where that talent is empowered and supported to do the best work of their lives. As a public company CEO, I can safely say this is the one aspect of being a CEO that rises above the rest — creating a strong company culture. The culture you create lays the foundation that enables every other part of the company to grow and succeed.

Individuals want to be a part of something magnificent, that has a meaningful impact in the world. It is not unlike the scene in the movie “Troy”, where the character of Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) has a pivotal conversation with his mother. She and Achilles both know that she’ll never see her son again if he leaves to fight. Yet in the next scene, Achilles is on a Troy-bound ship, ready for war. Why? Because he, like many people, had a profound desire to be part of something greater than himself.

The same is true at a company level — which is why job one in creating a culture is building a purpose-driven culture. What is the mission of the company? What is the bigger idea that we are all part of? It is the CEO’s job to articulate and communicate this purpose across the company, so team members at every level have something to rally around.

At Intuit, our mission is to improve our customers’ financial lives so profoundly they can’t imagine going back to the old way. We keep the kitchen table where Intuit was born on display in our main building — to remind us of where we came from and of our never-ending mission.

Here are other key steps you can take to create a strong culture:

Foster an environment where everyone’s ideas matter

People naturally defer to ideas that come from the CEO or other executives, but it’s essential for people to know that their ideas really matter. Oftentimes, employees are closest to the customer, and closest to the work. It is important that a leader creates a culture where the meritocracy of ideas prevails, not Power Point, persuasion, or positional hierarchy. To set the tone, leaders should begin by listening first, asking people what they think and giving them the opportunity to speak before you share your own ideas. Then hold all ideas to the same scrutiny — testing for impact — which leads to the next point below.

Build an environment for doers

Academic debates can certainly be intellectually stimulating, but they don’t get things done. Bulldozers, on the other hand, can flatten mountains. One way leaders can create an action-oriented environment is to match inspiration with rigor, adopting a rapid experimentation culture. Great ideas are simply hypotheses unless matched with tangible proof they deliver meaningful impact. A rapid experimentation culture cuts through the hierarchy (especially if leaders hold their own ideas to the same scrutiny of testing), creating an environment where everyone can innovate, and “debate” turns into “doing”.

Hold regular chats with employees

I’m a big believer in chats. They can be a great way to diagnose whether people feel empowered. When I do a chat, I usually ask three questions: What’s getting better than it was six months ago, and why? What is not making enough progress, or is actually getting worse than it was six months ago, and why? What is the one thing you think I need to know that will help you be more effective? The first two questions are the 90 percent diagnostic. The last question is the 10 percent inspiration. When I learn something about the company I didn’t know — it’s a surprise that I savor.

To create a strong company culture is to create something people want to be a part of, and encourage their friends to join. The cornerstone to creating such a culture begins with an aspirational purpose, backed by an environment where employees’ ideas matter as much as yours, and where people can get things done. Then to keep you honest along the way, constantly diagnosing your progress — or lack of progress — by conducting front-line employee chats. If you do all these well, your culture will speak for itself.

This post was originally shared on LinkedIn on 1/26/16

The Most Important Job of a CEO was originally published in Intuit Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Intuit, we’ve been a long-time partner and advocate for small businesses. Over three decades, we’ve witnessed much change and growth in the small business environment. One of the most exciting shifts we’ve observed is the rise of self-employed workers, which is taking place today. Our thesis suggests this shift is creating a new breed of entrepreneur that has the potential to usher in a new golden age of small business. Yet to truly empower this new generation of entrepreneurs, we’ll need to reimagine and reinvent the way society views small businesses.

To be clear, the self-employed segment is already a large and growing group, and is only going to get bigger. The number of self-employed workers has grown from 6 percent of the workforce 30 years ago, to more than one-third today. Our research projects that the number of self-employed will represent nearly half of the entire workforce by 2020.

This rise has been turbo-charged by the emergence of on-demand platforms such as Uber and HourlyNerd. While many entrepreneurs use on-demand marketplaces as a flexible way to make some extra money, these platforms are also a means of controlling your own destiny, and a first step to seeing how far you can go on your own. They de-risk the proposition of starting your own business — with these “businesses of one” using on-demand work to generate income in service to financing themselves, or finding customers at the push of a button. The entrepreneur becomes “the product,” with the on-demand platforms providing the connection to a pool of potential on-demand customers. This stunning ease-of-entry would have been impossible five years ago.

This shift, while exciting, is also creating challenges for this next generation of sole proprietors. Current infrastructure and policies — in areas ranging from taxes and healthcare to rent and home mortgages — are designed for people with steady paychecks. The new breed of on-demand entrepreneurs don’t fit into this rigid system. They often experience irregular streams of income from a variety of sources. Taxes can be a nightmare, and many are unclear about their annual and quarterly tax obligations. To help these new entrepreneurs grow and thrive, we must create more flexible systems.

At Intuit, we’ve done just that, re-imagining our financial products to serve these new entrepreneurs with our QuickBooks Self-Employed product. This new product helps users untangle their income streams and get a handle on their tax situation. We’re thrilled to be saving self-employed customers $3,800 on average in tax savings annually. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we and others — in both the private and public sectors — can do to support these new entrepreneurs.

To achieve the full potential of this emerging shift, we must think about the self-employed as a new face of entrepreneurship — and begin shaping solutions that reflect their new reality. To aid in our understanding, we continue to conduct extensive research into this rapidly emerging area — and we agree with U.S. Sen. Mark Warner and Purdue University President Mitch Daniels that it’s time for government regulations to modernize and support this growing group.

We’re early in the game, but the potential to fuel a whole new wave of innovation and support an expanding entrepreneurial population is before us. We must lean in and find ways to help this new breed of entrepreneurs truly thrive.

Originally posted on LinkedIn on January 5, 2016