One advantage of WFH is the increased amount of quiet undisrupted time I get every morning – between coffee time and my “work” work time. I use the 1-hour window for reading. The #DailyThoughts series serves as a place to jog down my personal takes of the morning reading topics.
Today I read about the SnapTax success story – The product idea is simple, what if we can enable taxfilling right from people’s phone? After its launch, there was a huge demand and people love the simplicity. The interesting twist is that this is not a team of computer geeks working off of their garages and challenging the mainframe tax prep software. It was a business branch within Intuit – America’s largest producer of finance, tax and accounting tools. Intuit is not a startup in any measurement.
There are millions of factors that contributed to the success. What resonates with me at the current stage of my life is how Inuit senior management provided the space for innovation. Here were what they did (ref/credit: The Lean Startup)
“Did they face constant meddling from senior management, which is the bane of innovation teams in many companies? No, their executive sponsors created an ‘island of freedom’ where they could experiment as necessary.”
“What allowed the SnapTax team to innovate was not their genes, destiny, or astrological signs but a process deliberately facilitated by Intuit’s senior management. Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed. It can, but to do so requires a new management discipline, one that needs to be mastered not just by practicing entrepreneurs seeking to build the next big thing but also by the people who support them, nurture them, and hold them accountable. In other words, cultivating entrepreneurship is the responsibility of senior management. Today, a cutting-edge company such as Intuit can point to success stories like SnapTax because it has recognized the need for a new management paradigm. This is a realization that was years in the making.”
To all entrepreneurs with a builder mindsets out there – never overlooks the importance of senior management sponsorship and culture.