On November 14, 1970, a plane crash took the lives of 37 Marshall University football players, their coach, and 27 other staff and community members who were returning from a game in North Carolina. Brad Smith stood on a small hill near his hometown of Kenova, West Virginia, watching his cousins and other community members fighting to contain the fiery aftermath. That event, of course, left an indelible impression on him, while also showing him the value of teamwork, community, and resilience.

Smith graduated from Marshall in 1986, and later added a master’s degree in management from Aquinas College in Michigan while working a full-time day job for Pepsi. After a few career changes, he landed at Intuit in 2003. Smith started out working in Plano, Texas, running the accountant relations portion of the professional tax business. Thanks to his success there, Intuit asked him to move to San Diego to run TurboTax, the company’s flagship consumer tax business. In 2005, Smith moved to Silicon Valley to help lead a team that would fend off an attempt by Microsoft to steal market share from QuickBooks. Having proven that he was more than just a manager, the board of directors named him CEO in 2008, succeeding Intuit founder Scott Cook. 

As a leader, Smith melds innovation with profit-motive. For instance, based on Google’s innovative model, he implemented unstructured time where employees can use 10 percent of their time to work on any project they choose. His theory is sound. Smith says, “. . . people who focus on things they love will work harder and get more done. We’re looking for great ideas that will improve our workers’ skills and efficiency. We’re also hoping to foster innovation—if someone has an idea for a new product that our customers would love, then we encourage them to go for it.” Since introducing unstructured time, Intuit has seen more than 200 initiatives go to market, resulting in $100 million in new revenue. 

Another one of Smith’s strategies was to focus on design in order to overcome the perception that financial software is boring and dull. He even reconfigured the layout of the physical space within the organization, making fewer cubicles and more open spaces, encouraging collaboration. In 2015, his vision was to make Intuit one of the most designdriven companies in the world by 2020, and although there may be no objective measure of success for such a goal, Intuit’s constant innovation and design strategies have paid off. When he took the helm of Intuit at the age of 43, the company had 8,000 employees and annual revenues of $2.6 billion. By early 2020, as well as being a long-term member of Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Places to Work,” the company’s revenues had tripled, and the stock price had risen from under $25 to over $260 per share (NASDAQ: INTU). Smith attributes his success as a leader to lessons he gathered along the way: from his parents, who instilled a sense of community, family, and leadership; to his academic career; and to his extracurricular experiences, such as teaching martial arts. In high school, he’d played football until his sophomore year when he decided to dedicate his  time to studying martial arts. By the time Smith was a senior he had earned his black belt, and soon after, he notes, “I was teaching an entire school, with about 150 students. You get measured on the progress of the students you’re teaching. It’s no longer about your own abilities; it’s about building the capability in others. I fall back on that to this day.”  

College was formative as well. Of his alma mater, Smith says, “Marshall has a sense of purpose and values that I love. Look at what it has accomplished since the plane crash. Champions aren’t defined by whether they hit the canvas, but by how quickly they get back up. Marshall University just perseveres. It’s a university that has been hit with tragedy and fought its way through, and it just keeps coming back. And I think that is the secret to life.” 

In late 2018, at the relatively young age of 54 and after 11 years at the helm of Intuit, Smith announced that he was turning over the top spot to Executive Vice President Sasan Goodarzi on January 1, 2019, so he could focus on his duties as a board member of Intuit as well as Nordstrom and Survey Monkey, and pursue a passion for improving public education, especially in often “overlooked” zip codes, like his hometown in West Virginia. Even though his leadership certainly played a key role in the company’s success so far, Smith would be the first to tell you that he didn’t do it all on his own. One of his favorite quotes comes from Bill Campbell, a well-known business coach and one of Smith’s early mentors, who said, “Your title makes you a manager, people decide if you’re a leader.”

Case Questions 

1. What personal traits does Brad Smith possess that aid him as a leader? Are these traits consistent with the early trait perspectives on leadership? 

2. How would you describe Brad Smith’s leadership style? Which leadership concepts, models, or theories best reflect how he leads? 

3. Do you believe that Smith’s gender played a part in his success? Why or why not? 

4. What are three important leadership lessons that you can learn from Smith’s career path