McChrystal partnered with Intuit to help them develop and implement their “One Intuit” strategy, enabling them to not only maintain but strengthen their position in the market despite increased competition from start-ups and changing customer demands.
Why this industry/problem set is relevant in the world today:
As the rate of technological innovation increases, large, legacy organizations see their positions coming under threat from new industry disruptors and start-ups. The challenge then faced by many large, established companies is how to be as agile and adaptable as a start-up, while still operating at scale.
Legacy technology companies, the big guys, are all worried about the same thing, the small start up coming out of the dorm room, built on the latest technology, taking huge swipes at us. How do you take a company at scale and move it with the speed of a start up?
Chief Executive Officer
Challenges
For decades technology companies had been creating separate desktop products for personal and small business finances. However, a transition to cloud-based products had created increased customer demand for workflow and data interconnectivity, and a singular user experience across an entire suite of software products. While smaller, agile start-ups had quickly adjusted to account for this change in customer demand, Intuit had struggled to make similar adjustments due to the following challenges:
- Strong growth, both organic and through acquisition, had transformed the organization from a nimble start-up to a large, complex and heavily siloed conglomeration of business units and functional groups.
- Poor connectivity across successful but distinct teams led to strategic and operational inefficiencies, and unrealized potential.
- Heavy bureaucratic inertia limited the ability to take advantage of market opportunities and combat new competition from both traditional players and start-ups.
Solutions
Cascaded the Strategy across the Entirety of Intuit
The company had created a “One Intuit” strategy but was struggling to articulate what this meant to employees. McChrystal carried out a series of workshops across levels and business units to clarify this new strategy and cascade it throughout the company. At the centre of this strategy was a framework that McChrystal developed to empower teams and enable them to coordinate on supporting operational and tactical efforts. While serving customers had always been one of Intuit’s key founding principles, greater empowerment throughout the company helped every team, irrespective of function, feel like they were contributing to customer satisfaction.
Connected leaders through a Company-wide Forum
McChrystal connected leaders across the organization on a regular cadence by implementing a “One Intuit” Forum and enhancing other aspects of Intuit’s communications. This created opportunities for leadership to contextualize the One Intuit strategy, and for teams to communicate new developments, needs and successes.
Impact
- Employees: increased genuine buy-in, understanding, and confidence in the strategic direction and their respective role within it, resulting in highest employee engagement scores within an annual third party employee survey.
- Shareholders: appreciated a principled, multi-year strategy articulated both concisely in a single page and expanded to include the details of supporting components cascaded across all teams, resulting in an increase in market cap from $18 billion to $29 billion in recent years.
McChrystal Group Case Study: Unifying a Team and Product Suite
