Sometimes, it’s the soft spoken guys who throw the biggest bombs. At this week’s Techonomy conference, Intuit co-founder Scott Cook was pretty radical in his economic and political analysis. Arguing that all companies need to turn themselves upside down, he told me that it’s the young technology entrepreneur – the Zuckerberg or the Shawn Fanning – who is most skilled at navigating today’s ever-turbulent economic waters. “The most brilliant things are done when we are young”, he reminded me, in his message to older executives unwilling to hand over power to their younger colleagues.
But it’s in his political analysis that Cook really went nuclear. Arguing that “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”, he made the case for the Singapore or China model of economic growth, where great (and old) leaders have been able to reinvent their countries. In China, for example, Cook uses the example of Deng Xiaoping’s establishment of “Special Economic Zones” such as in Shenzhen that, he says, resulted in 300 million Chinese people being liberated from “grinding poverty”.
Not everyone, of course, would agree with Cook. The anti-Apple monologist Mike Daisey, whom I will interview early next week, might also point to the terrible human costs of the Shenzhen “experiment” in China. And I have to confess my own ambivalence about Cook’s embrace of the Chinese or Singaporean model for America. After all, do we really want a Deng Xiaoping or a Lee Kuan Yew to determine technological policy in America?
Intuit Inc. is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses; financial institutions, including banks and credit unions; consumers and accounting professionals. Its flagship products and services, including QuickBooks™, Quicken™ and TurboTax™, simplify small business management and payroll processing, personal finance, and tax preparation and filing. ProSeries™ and Lacerte™ are Intuit’s leading tax preparation offerings for professional accountants. The company’s financial institutions division, anchored by Digital Insight, provides on-demand banking services to help...
Mike Daisey has been called “the master storyteller†and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation†by the New York Times for his groundbreaking monologues which weave together autobiography, gonzo journalism, and unscripted performance to tell hilarious and heartbreaking stories that cut to the bone, exposing secret histories and unexpected connections. His monologues include last season’s critically acclaimed If You See Something Say Something, the controversial How Theater Failed America, the six-hour epic Great Men of Genius,...
Scott Cook started his career at Procter & Gamble, where he learned about product development, market research, and marketing. He soon began using the insights he was learning there to look for an idea for a company of his own. That idea came to him one day when his wife was complaining about paying the bills. With personal computers just coming out at the time, Scott thought there might be a market for basic software that would help...
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