Intuit

Very good compensation package (salary and bonus). Great benefits: outstanding health, dental, and vision plans. 401k matching plan. 3 weeks vacation after one year of service. Good reward system for specific achievements (spotlight awards at manager's discretion). Very nice campus: new buildings, a great cafeteria, coffee shop, workout room, and game room. Nice perks: wine and beer tastings on Fridays, company events. No one works more than 40 hours a week (unless they want to).

A company stuck in the 90s searching for a future. Upper management continuously talks about turning Intuit into a growth stock but cannot articulate a growth strategy beyond vague comparisons to tech leaders like Google, Apple, and Facebook at every company event. While it is always good to look upwards for inspiration, none of the companies mentioned have anything in common with INTU.

Intuit is old school and has not mastered the web. Each new offering takes forever to be developed and marketed, squandering opportunities again and again. Besides a few clumsy attempts and some noise regarding growth curves and inflection points, there is still no credible business strategy to offer profitable services in mobile platforms.

Corporate speak is pervasive. The company boasts a multi-page glossary on its intranet of all the bizarre terms that are unique to Intuit and their meaning, and the list keeps growing. There are also innumerable management practices that are tied to a culture that pursues style instead of substance. It is more important to be known as a "team player" that talks the talk about values and leadership and parrots Dilbert-like slogans instead of producing solid achievements.

There is also a lot of waste, like at most large companies. This manifests itself in the pursuit of pet projects that add no value to the bottom line (for example, the jingle generator) and are very costly.

While the company claims to treat its employees respectfully, it has not hesitated in laying off hundreds of people, including highly senior individuals that will walk out the door with large chunks of the company's corporate memory. The layoffs have been largely sold as a move to bring fresh blood into Intuit, but their credibility is low since the layoffs have not been followed by an organized strategic plan that will drive growth from new markets. No concerted effort was made to retrain or retarget the people affected by the layoffs. The layoffs came out in the same month when the huge upper management bonuses were issued. The rationale for those inflated bonuses completely escapes me.

A lot of people work in silos and do not take responsibility for things outside their direct sphere of action. Things that should be relatively simple are often delayed by multiple days because everyone is passing the buck.

The company, to its credit, has attempted to establish internal innovation forums where employees can submit ideas. However, there does not seem to be any kind of filtering of those ideas. The end result is that all kinds of things get equal attention (a new application to "poke" your friends in Facebook with environmental advice), and very few, if any, represent ideas that will generate new business opportunities.

Be realistic about your goals. You cannot expect to grow a multi-billion dollar company at 20% YOY without a credible strategy and some world-class execution. If you want to compare yourself to Apple, you need to realize that AAPL makes money on every product and service that they release. They create and grow entire markets while maintaining the tie-ins to existing products and services to deliver new business. Also, their execution is generally excellent, and that is not just about the "brand".

You are not Google or Facebook. You are not in the business of becoming hip or cool. You command a solid multi-billion dollar business that is quite profitable, although most of your income comes once a year. At the same time, the business is largely fairly conservative because it deals with people's money and personal information.

The most logical thing to do is to leverage the existing businesses to provide services that will enable people to use their money, make decisions, borrow, invest, get financial advice, and budget with greater ease and mobility. You will need to partner with a lot of other companies; you cannot develop all the pieces in-house. You only have one chance to do it, since all the credit card companies and all the banks are hot on your heels or are ahead of you already.

It is your market to lose.