We are intellectually indebted to the work of P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham and their book Breakthroughs! as a rich source of background material on the development of the 3M Post-it Notes, the microwave oven, Tagamet, Federal Express, and the CT Scanner, which we use as examples in our chapter on innovation.

Cook’s challenge inspired a multiyear effort to make experimentation a companywide capability. Today, Intuit nurtures experimentation in five key ways.

EXPERIMENTAL TEAMS. Intuit assembles small “discovery teams,” like the ones behind SnapTax and PersonalPro, around promising ideas. A typical team includes individuals drawn from engineering, product management, and design— what cook calls “a hacker, a hustler, and a dreamer.” Once constituted, these teams operate outside the chain of command and enjoy a high level of autonomy. To ensure they don’t get bogged down in bureaucracy, teams are matched up with executive sponsors. The SnapTax team, for example, was mentored by the VP of product management for TurboTax, Intuit’s VP of engineering, and Scott Cook. Sponsors meet with teams once a week to provide coaching, remove bottlenecks, and help secure resources. Further support comes from Intuit’s innovation catalysts—a group of two hundred experimentation “black belts” who dedicate 10 percent of their time helping colleagues identify customer needs, design experiments, and build prototypes.

INNOVATION TRAINING. Designing experiments takes skill, and at intuit, every employee gets the chance to become a pro. The company’s innovation curriculum, Design for Delight (D4D), is a weeklong course that builds skills in three areas: customer empathy, idea development, and rapid prototyping. New hires are expected to complete the course within their first three months. Further training is offered via “Lean StartIn,” a weeklong workshop where a team uses the D4D methodology to address customer pain points. Over the course of five days, the group develops three to four prototypes and runs multiple tests. More than two thousand employees have participated in a Lean StartIn since the program’s launch in 2012.

TIME FOR EXPERIMENTATION. Intuit also supports experimentation with “unstructured time.” All associates are encouraged to spend 10 percent of their time working on a passion project. Employees can consolidate this time into blocks and are encouraged to sync up with colleagues to tackle chunky problems. In a typical example, the team responsible for QuickBooks saved up its unstructured time over several months so it could devote a full week to brainstorming new product features. During the week, the team created a prototype for a mobile version of its signature product. Jeff Zias, an innovation leader at Intuit, reckons that over the last decade, unstructured time spawned five hundred discrete projects that eventually shipped products or services to internal and external customers.

DEDICATED FUNDING. Innovators at intuit have multiple sources of experimental capital. Each department has an experimentation budget for upgrading current products. Would-be experimenters can also compete for funds in periodic innovation challenges and 13 14 hackathons. Finally, innovators can seek support from the CEO fund, a discretionary pool Cook established to ensure that outlier ideas don’t get starved of resources. Investments are typically small—tens of thousands of dollars over two to three months—but can range higher when an idea needs longer incubation. PersonalPro, for example, received several million dollars over three years. Existing businesses are expected to match the CEO fund for ideas that will benefit their customers.

ENABLING FUNCTIONS. Support functions are responsible for enabling experimentation. In 2012, Intuit’s IT department cut the time it took to set up an online test from two months to two hours. The following year, the legal department published guidelines on how to run an experiment without the need for a legal sign-off. Staff functions are also expected to experiment with their own services. A few years ago, an HR project manager prototyped a program that put job applicants into a live Intuit project before the final hiring decision. The results were so impressive that this is now a key part of Intuit’s recruitment process.

Robert H. Bloom and Dave Conti’s book The Inside Advantage: The Strategy at Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business, and Rick Kash and David Calhoun’s book How Companies Win: Profiting From Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You’re In.

Part 1: The oblique world

3. The profit-seeking paradox

George Merck and Robert Johnson created great businesses which, in consequence, made remarkable amounts of money for their shareholders. ICI and Boeing were more successful as profit-making companies when they ‘served customer’s internationally through the responsible application of chemistry’ or ‘ate, breathed and slept the world of aeronautics’ than when they tried to ‘maximise value for our shareholders’ or ‘go into a value based environment’.

Part Two: Practicing The Science of Failing Well

Chapter Five: We Have Met the Enemy

“Today, Dalio credits this failure as a major cause of his subsequent extraordinary success, including his firm’s becoming the largest and most profitable hedge fund in history: “In retrospect, that failure was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It gave me the humility I needed to balance my aggressiveness and shift [my] mindset from thinking, ‘I’m right,’ to asking myself, ‘How do I know I’m right?’”

How do I know I am right?

It’s a powerful question. Failing well, perhaps even living well, requires us to become vigorously humble and curious—a state that does not come naturally to adults.