Intern Briefing with Intuit CMO

I wanted to write this blog entry right away while all of the ideas/career advice that Intuit CMO shared with us. One of the first things he did was he talked about his career journey which I think almost all people who do these kinds of presentations do, but he had an interesting spin that I hadn't seen before. He showed his career journey in terms of the trajectory (jobs, life events, etc) on the x axis, but on the y-axis of this he showed his emotional energy level which was really an interesting way to think about things. After he talked about that and about Intuit, he opened up the floor for questions and this was really great because one thing I've realized with these executives is that time with with them is invaluable because they really are booked back to back. So, I've written a pseudo-transcript of my questions

If you could give us three pieces of career advice that you would say have really been responsible for your success what would you say those are?

1) Foundation- Choose a place what will provide you with a solid foundation for your career. Make sure it's somewhere that will give you the kind of training/experience that will be invaluable throughout your career. When I look at resumes I always will look for whether this person has had the foundation necessary to succeed.

2) A role that gets noticed- Make sure that whatever you are working on has a great deal of visibility. This can be challenging in large corporate environments, but if you are working on something that has a great deal of visibility, then you will be at the top of mind across the organization.

3) Innovation/Teamwork- Well, I can't remember if this was exact. But, he did talk about how companies are being forced to be innovative in order to succeed and those that don't innovate are becoming obsolete. Even the most old school businesses are innovating.


What are the things that you took into consideration when choosing your first employer and what do you think are the main criteria to choosing the right employer?

Look for companies that value these criteria. The problem with companies that don't value these criteria is that you may get ahead by stepping on people, but you have to ask yourself is that the kind of environment you want to work in?
1) Leadership
2) Problem Solving
3) Communication


What are your thoughts on the speed at which somebody gets promoted and moving up the ladder quickly in your career?

Don't be in a hurry. Believe it or not, usually when the times it took me longer to get promoted were the most valuable to my career. As a result of having two extra years before a promotion, I was able to observe at least two extra business cycles which ended being very different than the first and as a result I had even a stronger foundation.

What do you think of this Web 2.0 thing? Are we headed for another 1999-style dot com bust or have we learned from our mistakes? (this was really interesting)

Google actually believe it or not has hired a guy who's like an internet historian. He's like a professor of the internet and they hired him because they can hire anybody. But this guy's job is to sit around think about the internet and where it's headed. The prediction is that the internet as we know it today has reached about 10% of it's evolution. This basically means we've probably still got some boom and bust cycles to come, but we're getting smarter and more disciplined about how we do this. There will definitely be shake out, but the downturns also always result in creation of new businesses.