CCRP - Week 1 (Tuesday)

Day 2 (Tuesday - 19 August 2008)

Introductions, Menlo Park campus scavenger hunt, creative pipe cleaner contest, more skits, overview of the program, the schedule and activities, and the program objectives. The main key words are listed here:

• Connect with Customers (develop a passion to address customer needs)
• Experience the life of our Customer Support Agents (understand the downstream implications of business decisions)
• Establish a lasting Network of Intuit employees (leverage talent across the company)
• Obtain a unique perspective to post-program roles (so you can be the best you can be)

Result --> As you start your journey towards becoming a great leader on your team, building high quality products that solve our customer needs.

Learned that there are 47 total CCRP participants: 27 Product Developers (PD), 10 Small Business (RDP), 8 Finance & Operations (FRDP), and 2 Finance NGN.

Nancy Smithline, RDP Leader, taught the group about avoiding the comfort zone and staying in the learning zone. She provided a statistic that adults learn 10% in a classroom setting, 20% from peer and social settings, and 70% on the job. Therefore, we should be engaged in learning and never complacent when it comes to being actively engaged in our own development and learning. She counseled that we should be proactive about our own learning.

The three groups executive sponsors and leaders gave presentations on their expectations and counsel to our group. First, Bill Irihe explained that he was increasingly seeking out new talent from recent graduates because of their creativity, ideas, and energy. Steven Aldrich, VP of Strategy & Innovation discussed the importance of the learning zone, the Intuit culture, mindset. He also said not to be afraid to fail. He feels that a lot of bad decisions are made simply because information is not shared. Also, Steven also made it clear that it was okay to know something and to work from consciously incompetent, to consciously competent.

Dave Marenbach, VP of Global Finance & Executive sponsor for FRDP stated that he wanted us to be similar to the historic minstrels by being wanderers, spread the news of what is beyond the immediate functional area walls, share excitement with others day to day. Dave also said Intuit invests in us because of our ideas and energy that we bring. He reminded us to live the learn teach learn principle. He counseled us to join various networks like NGN, get involved, and raise the bar. Idea Jams are important to attend and get involved as much as possible.

Group pictures were taken prior to having lunch with the senior leaders. After lunch we did more skits and group presentations showing our understanding of the activities and purpose of the various weeks ahead in the program. We had a panel Q & A session with our respective programs and had past years participants answer any questions we had.

We had a FRDP Panel with several of the FRDP '07 class. We asked questions (mine a little too deep) which helped us all know what to expect.

We broke up into three teams to build last minute skits to express the Intuit Social, Mobile, Global growth strategy. We then presented these skits in order to Brad Smith, Intuits President and CEO. His presentation was awesome and I wish I could have recorded it but in short these are just a few highlights from his talk.

• Intuit has 70 million user base
• Intuits new customers are different
• Value creation is changing (users is where the value is) and the users are relying less on desktops, laptops, and moving to Mobile and global technologies
• Intuit is focused on providing easy to use connected services through social, mobile, and global
• Intuit needs to create paths not trails
• A leader is one who has the ability to affect change. (1) burning a need to change, (2) vision, (3) road map.
• Movement is about experience (cross functional, cross company, education, etc.)
  Be open and honest. take risks and don't be afraid to fail. He shared his experience of losing $40M in a past company because of a decision he made and the Board of Directors thanked him for being honest and they went on to learn from it and become very profitable.
• Its not about what you know but the questions you ask.
• Love you job, who you work with, and make sure you can pay your bills.

Brad's energy and vision was great to hear about. I am excited to assist this great company triumph in this critical moment in its history.

After work, Shannon and I joined our FRDP group along with David Merenbach, Lucy Beard, & John Mastrorilli at a nice restaurant in Palo Alto where we ate good food and socialized. It was great to hang-out with everyone after a fun filled day. Shannon also enjoyed getting to know all my co-workers and leaders.