Feature your failures, don’t run from them — Intuit founder Scott Cook

🎥 Dec 22, 2023 📺 JoeLonsdale ⏱ 0m

About Scott Cook

Scott Cook, founder and chairman of the executive committee at Intuit, has continued to share insights on leadership, experimentation, and organizational culture in recent appearances. In a March 2025 podcast, Cook discussed his experience overseeing over 100 add-on acquisitions, emphasizing the importance of addressing seller's remorse early in the integration process. He described talking to sellers about the emotional impact of selling their business and noted that he has never been in an acquisition where seller's remorse did not occur. Cook also stressed that "intervention without diagnosis is malpractice" and advocated for understanding the emotional dynamics of deal confirmation. In earlier talks, Cook has focused on methods for personal and organizational growth. He outlined a four-step process for founders to develop skills: becoming aware of gaps, committing publicly to improvement, finding what "great" looks like by learning from top performers, and shadowing those people to observe their behaviors. He has also promoted a culture of experimentation, arguing that leaders should move "from decision by hierarchy or opinion to decision by experiment" and that the boss's role is to create systems where junior employees can run fast, cheap experiments. Cook has been candid about his own failures, including stepping down as CEO after 11 years and later using a 360-degree review and executive coach to address weaknesses he had been unaware of. He has advised leaders to

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Transcript (1 segments)

Scott Cook0:10

Product line feature it here. If you have failures as a leader, you should be highlighting those for the organization, starting with yourself. Great example of this is our longtime CEO Brad Smith. After a year in the job, he did a round of speeches to the company and went to our engineering Tech Days where we have a thousand people, engineering leaders. He gave the dinner time talk and his central slide was, 'Here's my review of my first year in office.' He had in green all the stuff that he thought worked well, then he had in red all the things he had screwed up on. He had just as many in red as he had in green. So he was willing to feature failure because the organization can tell if you hide it; they know. But if you talk about it, you're going to learn from it. The only way to get better is to admit to failures and then learn root cause.