在Intuit首席執行官布拉德·史密斯辦公室墻外，訂著董事會成員對他的業績評價，未經修改。還有一份性格分析，一份高管團隊提供的反饋摘要，還有他安排時間的計劃。評價里大部分是溢美之詞，也有不好聽的。“保持正常節奏就好，”他的團隊說。“這家伙總是精力過剩。”有時“他的反饋過于溫和，我們更希望聽到他直截了當地說，‘嘿，這事你搞砸了。’”董事會成員認為他“談話時最好隨意一些，別總是那么一板一眼。”（史密斯承認他特別有條理，每天下班收件箱一定會清空，“衣柜里的衣架間隙都會嚴格保持兩指距離。”）董事會還認為他應該“公開提供更多有建設性的反饋。”對他來說這是另一種挑戰。史密斯承認，“內心深處就不愿意那么做。”

所有這些反饋都是公開的。只要花上五分鐘讀一讀史密斯辦公室門外各種反饋，你就能深入了解他，可能比某些每天共事的同事還要熟悉。當然了，Intuit里8200名員工不可能人人都去史密斯辦公室門口轉一圈，所以他每年都把所有反饋打包發給所有人。

Taped to the wall outside Intuit CEO Brad Smith’s office is his unedited performance review from the board of directors. Also a personality analysis, a compendium of feedback from his executive team, and a breakdown of how he spends his time. Most of it is laudatory; some isn’t. “A normalized pace would be good,” his team says. “This guy is always on hyperkinetic energy.” Sometimes “his feedback is wrapped in so much niceness—we’d love to hear straight up, ‘Look, you fumbled.’?” The board thinks he should “be willing to have more unstructured conversations—not everything buttoned up.” (Smith admits he’s so highly structured that his email in-box is empty at the end of every day and “I have two fingers between the hangers in my closet.”) The board also thinks he needs “to be willing to give constructive feedback in public.” That will be another challenge. Smith says, “My heart won’t let me do that.”

All of this feedback is publicly displayed. Spend five minutes reading the material next to Smith’s office door and you’ll know more about him than you know about some of the people you work with every day. Of course most of Intuit’s 8,200 employees will never walk past Smith’s office—so he emails the whole package to all of them each year.

公開透明當然是好的，但做這么絕可能讓人覺得荒謬。Intuit內部員工都覺得很正常，這也是解開一項秘密的線索。秘密是：為什么Intuit能長盛不衰？在新排出的《財富》未來50強里Intuit排名第八，明年發展勢頭更好，收入預計會大幅增長。但這家企業已經34歲了，比很多企業歷史都要久。其涉及的業務是專業的個人電腦軟件，面臨的競爭非常激烈。1983年成立以來，很多曾經的同行（例如Flexidraw、VisiCalc等）早已消失。

然而Intuit不僅蒸蒸日上，而且發展速度極快。據EVA Dimensions咨詢公司統計，其收入已達52億美元，較2012年增長了36%；利潤也創下紀錄。資本回報率達到60%，資本成本僅為6.9%，所以評定Intuit的財務狀況超過99%的上市公司。Intuit比很多著名的創業公司盈利還高，比很多現有同行發展速度又快很多。即便股價創下新高，幾乎所有分析師還是建議買入。Intuit簡直就是商界的橄欖球明星湯姆·布拉迪，湯姆在很多同齡人退役之后仍然保持著極佳的競技水平。

部分原因是：從成立開始，Intuit就做到了現在每家企業都在學習的一點，不斷顛覆自身，在競爭對手超越之前積極調整產品線和商業模型。

Intuit最初的產品是Quicken個人財務軟件，遭到微軟的Windows旗下DOS系統排擠后只能重找出路。上世紀90年代的新產品包括為小企業會計處理開發的QuickBooks和為個人納稅開發的TurboTax，都迅速打敗了競爭對手，互聯網發端后Intuit專門開發出網絡版，移動互聯網時代再次改版。回想起來仿佛都很簡單，但每次轉型都意味著思路大調整，在手機上申報稅務？但Intuit確實做到了，也成功避免了常見的大企業病。

目前其自我顛覆可能比以往任何一次都要激進，五年前高管層決定Intuit不只當產品和服務提供商，應該成為開放平臺。“小公司平均使用16到20款軟件，我們只做了其中三款，”53歲的史密斯表示，他擔任首席執行官一職已經10年。“所以我們應該開放自己的平臺，相信此舉可以提升客戶忠誠度，也能借此更深入地了解需要解決的問題。”

如今全公司都在賭，賭的是打造在線開放平臺歡迎外部開發者——也包括潛在競爭對手之后，實力只會增強而不會削弱。屆時開發者可以提供與Intuit產品兼容的應用。舉個例子，美國運通向運通商務信用卡持卡人提供免費應用，每日可自動將轉賬交易記錄在QuickBooks在線賬戶里。這對美國運通來說是個賣點，QuickBooks用戶管理賬目也更方便，也會更依賴開放平臺。

Transparency is great, but this, you might think, is ridiculous. No one seems to think so at Intuit (INTU, +0.86%) , however, and that’s a clue to a mystery worth solving. It’s this: Why is Intuit still here? It’s No. 8 on Fortune’s new ranking of the Future 50, the companies best prepared to thrive and grow their revenue rapidly in coming years. Yet at age 34 it’s older than almost all the others. Its business, specialized personal-computing software, is brutally competitive. All its peers from 1983 (Flexidraw, VisiCalc) are long gone.

Yet Intuit is not just surviving, it’s blowing the doors off. Revenue, at $5.2 billion, is up 36% since 2012; profits are at an all-time high. Return on capital is a towering 60%, while cost of capital is a measly 6.9%, according to the EVA Dimensions consulting firm, which ranks Intuit’s financial performance in the 99th percentile of all public companies. Intuit is simultaneously more profitable than glamorous startups and growing faster than established incumbents. Even as its stock hits new highs, nearly all analysts rate it a buy. This is the Tom Brady of its industry—performing at the top of its game at an age when its onetime peers have long since stopped playing.

Here’s part of the explanation: Since its founding, Intuit has done what every company today must learn to do, disrupting itself continuously, reinventing its products and its business model before any competitor can beat it to it.

The company’s original product, Quicken personal-finance software, had to be re-?created when Microsoft Windows supplanted the DOS operating system. New products in the 1990s, QuickBooks for small-business accounting and TurboTax for personal tax preparation, defeated incumbents—and maintained their leads when Intuit re ?created them online for the web’s earliest days. Those products had to be reconceived again at the dawn of the mobile era. It all seems obvious in retrospect, but each transformation was a mind bender at the time—doing taxes on a phone?—which Intuit achieved, avoiding the creeping danger of big-company disease.

Its current self-disruption, arguably more radical than any before, began five years ago when top managers decided Intuit had to be more than a provider of products and services. It had to become an open platform. “The average small business uses 16 to 20 apps, and we make three,” explains Smith, 53, who has been CEO for 10 years. “So we had to open up our platform and trust that this would make our customers more loyal to us and also would give us insights into problems we could go solve.”

The company gambled that it would become stronger, not weaker, by welcoming outside developers—potential competitors —onto an online platform where they can offer apps that work with Intuit products. Example: American Express offers a free app for holders of AmEx business credit cards that automatically transfers card transactions to the user’s QuickBooks Online account every day. It’s a selling point for American Express, and it ties QuickBooks customers more strongly to the platform by making their lives easier.

開放平臺策略確實奏效，目前已提供1400余款應用。Intuit也獲得了意料之外的機會。舉例來說，小企業成功還是失敗的關鍵因素之一就是有沒有請會計。Intuit為60萬名會計提供稅務軟件。所以去年Intuit啟動了在線匹配功能，可為會計與QuickBooks在線用戶牽線搭橋。去年估計有60萬家小企業客戶成為會計的新客戶，主要就是靠這項匹配功能。“對會計和小企業是雙贏，”史密斯表示，“對我們來說，QuickBooks用戶留存率增加了16個（百分）點。”這個數字相當了不起，因為啟動匹配功能之前QuickBooks在線用戶續訂率已在75%左右。

Intuit也由此轉型為行業生態系統，包括客戶、應用開發者、會計師和Intuit在內的各方以全新方式合作共贏。又是一次成功的變革。

所以Intuit一直在沒有危機推動的前提下顛覆自身。這不太尋常。各行各業的企業，從零售商、汽車制造商、媒體公司到財務顧問公司都在拼命適應數字時代，免得淪為下一個玩具反斗城、柯達公司或是舊金山出租車公司Yellow Cab，下場要么是破產，要么實力大為削弱，要么徹底消失。但轉型舉措少見成功。幾乎所有面臨困境的企業都制定了數字化戰略，但經常轉得不夠徹底，要么就是執行不力。即便成功度過危機，可能也得接受規模變小，行業地位降低，雇員減少的后果。與此相反，Intuit總能搶占先機，在紛繁蕪雜的當下實現低調轉型，而且越走越順。

這就讓人產生巨大的疑問：Intuit到底怎么做到的？尤其如今每家公司最擔心的就是不知從哪冒出來個競爭對手，徹底顛覆自己，找出Intuit成功的原因或許對所有人都有借鑒意義。在我們看來，Intuit的成功并不容易，但原因很明確，只是經常被忽視。“現有企業里沒什么類似例子，” Intuit前財務主管耐德·西格爾表示，8月他離開公司去Twitter擔任首席財務官。“Intuit成功的奧秘是世界上最大的秘密之一。”

為了解開這一謎團，首先得分析Intuit成立初期經歷的一些重要事件。當時Intuit唯一的產品是Quicken個人財務軟件，由創始人史考特·庫克在1983年開發。Intuit經常向用戶發放問卷，問用戶是在家還是辦公室使用Quicken軟件。調研結果是一半在辦公室使用。這不合理，庫克和同事們想，也許用戶是在辦公時間計算賬目管自己的錢。但還是感覺不對。“我們每次問這個問題，都有一半的人如此回答，”65歲的庫克回憶說，他現在擔任董事會執委會主席，仍然負責公司事務。“當時我很煩，為什么總有人答錯問題？后來我們仔細研究了。”

庫克和同事們發現真實情況相去甚遠。回答在辦公室使用的客戶并沒有算自己的賬，只是在用Quicken管理小企業賬目。“為什么他們要用Quicken呢？”庫克忍不住想。這款軟件并不是用來管理企業的，其他不少產品才是真正商用軟件。結果發現其他產品只是復制了大企業會計的記賬模式，而大部分小企業記賬人員根本不懂復制記賬法。“對大多數用戶來說，所謂‘總賬’像二戰英雄一樣遙遠，”庫克回憶道。“我們的產品里基本沒有結算這一道。”

結果是QuickBooks只用了兩個月就超過了市場上原本領先的產品（叫DacEasy），盡管QuickBooks價格貴了一倍（99美元vs49美元），功能也比對手少一半。“我們解決了一直讓人頭疼的大問題，”庫克說。如今QuickBooks的收入占Intuit的一半。??

關鍵在于Intuit從未放過任何反常之處。大部分企業做得剛好相反，就像庫克和同事們剛開始的反應一樣。他們會忽視反常的信息，或說服自己這并不重要。但Intuit就是靠著一次又一次解開奇怪現象的謎團，用Intuit管理者的話說就是“發掘驚喜”，切實做到了不斷改進自身，不給競爭對手超越的機會。舉例來說，Intuit發現在線資金管理服務應用Mint的一些用戶并不符合目標人群的年輕專業人士。經過調查，Intuit發現這部分客戶是自由職業者，用Mint管理收入和支出，比方說Uber或Lyft司機。隨著共享經濟崛起，Intuit也嗅到巨大的商機，因此專門開發了適合自由職業者使用的QuickBooks。現在是全公司增長最快的產品。

如果Intuit沒有將用戶研究透徹，就不會得出如此深刻的認識，而了解用戶也是Intuit成功的另一個關鍵點。所有公司都聲稱要了解客戶，但沒有一家有Intuit走得近。其最有效的用戶調研工具叫“跟我回家。”幾位員工一同拜訪客戶的家和辦公室（前提是獲得允許），看客戶如何使用產品。參與項目的員工都經過培訓：不可以問客戶，只能觀察。拜訪完成后員工們會立刻匯報，因為每個人都有自己的感悟。“這樣能盡快全面了解，”史密斯解釋說。“問題會變得直觀起來，因為親身體會到了。”

此舉反映的現實則是，客戶的說法有時不可信，但很多公司花費巨大代價才了解這點。客戶的行為才是真相。

The open platform is working and now offers some 1,400 apps. It has also created unexpected opportunities for Intuit. For example, a major factor in the success or failure of a small business is whether it works with an accountant. Intuit has relationships with 600,000 accountants who use its tax software. So last year Intuit launched an online matchmaking feature to connect accountants with QuickBooks Online users. In the past year an estimated 600,000 small-business customers have become new clients of accountants, thanks in large part to this feature. “That’s a huge win-win for both of them,” says Smith, “and for us it increases the retention of QuickBooks by 16 [percentage] points.” Which is saying something, because the pre-matchmaking customer renewal rate for QuickBooks Online was around 75%.

Intuit thus is becoming an ecosystem in which several parties—customers, app developers, accountants, and Intuit—find new ways to interact for mutual benefit. Another reinvention.

The recurring pattern is that Intuit disrupts itself without the motivation of a crisis. That’s highly unusual. Thousands of companies across the economy—retailers, carmakers, media firms, financial advisers—are trying desperately to remake themselves for a digital world lest they become the next Toys “R” Us or ?Kodak or San Francisco Yellow Cab: bankrupt, diminished, maybe dead. Few of those efforts will end well. Virtually all companies that get disrupted have a digital strategy; it’s usually inadequate, or they can’t execute it. Even survivors of a crisis almost always end up smaller, less significant in their industry, and employing fewer people. By contrast, Intuit preempts crises, compiling a record of prescient, low-drama transformation in a high-drama age, and thriving as a result.

All of which raises the giant question: How has Intuit done it? At a time when every company’s greatest fear is being disrupted by a competitor it never saw coming, the answer holds lessons for all businesses. The key to Intuit’s success is not simple, as we’ll see, but it is clear, and it has been largely overlooked. “There’s no business quite like it,” says Ned Segal, a former Intuit finance executive who left the company in August to become Twitter’s CFO. “Intuit is one of the best-kept secrets on the planet.”

To unravel the secret, start with a crucial event in the company’s early days. Its only product was Quicken personal-finance software, which founder Scott Cook had created in 1983. Intuit surveyed customers regularly, asking them among other things whether they used Quicken at home or in the office. Half said in the office. That made no sense, but Cook and his colleagues figured they were using office time to balance their checkbooks and manage their own money. Still, something seemed wrong. “Every time we asked that question, half said the same thing,” recalls Cook, 65, who now chairs the board’s executive committee and is still active at the company. “It just bugged me. Why were people answering that question wrong? So finally we dived in.”

Cook and company discovered they were way off base. Those customers weren’t balancing checkbooks: They were using Quicken to run small businesses. “But why were they using Quicken?” Cook wondered. It wasn’t designed for businesses, while dozens of other software products were. It turned out the other products replicated big-company accounting—and most small-business bookkeepers knew nothing about double-entry bookkeeping. “For most of them, ‘general ledger’ was a World War II hero,” Cook recalls. “So we built an accounting product that didn’t seem to have any accounting.”

The result was QuickBooks, which passed the market leader (called DacEasy) in just two months, even though QuickBooks cost twice as much ($99 vs. $49) and had fewer than half the features. “But we had solved the biggest unsolved problem,” Cook says. Today QuickBooks brings in half of Intuit’s revenue.

The key, which Intuit has never forgotten, was to focus on the finding that makes no sense. Most organizations do the opposite, as Cook and his colleagues did at first. They ignore the information that doesn’t fit, or convince themselves it isn’t important. Time and again, digging into the puzzling discovery —“savoring the surprise,” as Intuit’s leaders call it—has enabled the company to reinvent itself before competitors caught on. For example, Intuit recently found that some users of its online money management service Mint weren’t behaving like the young-professional target market. Investigating that surprise showed that these customers used Mint to manage self-employment income and spending; many were Uber or Lyft drivers, for example. With the gig economy growing, Intuit recognized a huge opportunity. So it created a version of QuickBooks especially for the self-employed. It’s the company’s fastest-growing product.

These critical insights never would have happened if Intuit hadn’t been studying its customers rigorously—another vital element of its success. All companies claim they want to get close to their customers, but few do it as obsessively as Intuit. Its most effective tool is the “follow-me-home.” A few employees together visit a customer’s home or office (with permission) and watch him or her using Intuit products. The employees are trained in how to do it: You don’t interview the customer; you just observe. They debrief immediately afterward because they all will have noticed something different, “so you get a complete picture much faster,” Smith says. “It puts a face to a problem. You see the humanity.”

The underlying reality is that you can’t believe what customers tell you, as most companies learn the hard way. Customer behavior is the truth.

The follow-me-home also has deep roots. Early customers were calling to complain of problems that hadn’t shown up when Intuit brought users into its offices to test software. Cook realized he was missing something but didn’t know how to find it. Then he read a Wall Street Journal article about American homeowners suing a foreign automaker. The plaintiffs had rented rooms in their homes to students at nearby universities, only to find that the “students” were actually employees of the automaker whose purpose was to observe how Americans use their cars. In this creepy tactic, Cook saw the kernel of a great idea. “We went to a local computer store, and every time they sold one of our products they included a note from us saying, ‘We’d like to come watch you take the shrink-wrap off the product’?”—and then observe what follows. Thus was born the follow-me-home. Today Intuit conducts some 10,000 hours of these visits annually. Smith himself does 60 to 100 hours a year. “What you get from a follow-me-home you can’t get from a data stream,” he says. “You’ve got to look somebody in the eye and feel the emotion.”

So Intuit obsesses over customer intimacy, and it has trained itself to embrace anomalies. Those are major strengths. But still, this is a big, successful business, and as every deposed CEO knows, that creates incentives to reject any change to the established order. Intuit therefore deploys clever managerial techniques to evade or defeat the organizational change-killers. Among them:

Tiny teams. New ideas are initially developed by “discovery teams,” typically only three people. They don’t report up the chain of command but instead go straight to a division general manager. The teams get intensive coaching every week or two from the GM or Cook, which helps them stand up to the barrage of opposition they’ll inevitably face from those with a stake in the status quo. The new self-employed version of QuickBooks was developed by a discovery team.

Shared experiences. When new ideas get further along, shared experiences can often obliterate conflicts. Six or seven years ago, when Smith wanted Intuit to focus on mobile devices, stiff pushback came from managers who believed the then-conventional view that no one makes money on mobile. So Intuit found companies that were making plenty of money on mobile and assigned managers to interview their executives. Next step was an off-site where they would report what they learned. “We didn’t have enough time,” Cook says. “They wouldn’t stop. They were convincing each other there was money to be made in mobile.” Today, using TurboTax, you can prepare and file a full 1040 from your phone.

Shared data, fast decisions. “My staff meeting used to be just me and my 12 direct reports,” says Smith. “Now we broadcast it to our top 400 leaders every month, and they have 24 hours to cascade it to all 8,200 employees.” A lot of infighting disappears when everyone knows what the top leaders are doing and why. Decisions get made much faster, and when a conflict arises, Intuit follows a sunset rule: If you can’t resolve it in 24 hours, you get another 24 hours to escalate it high in the organization to get a decision. “We’re just going to make the call and live with the consequences,” Smith says. “If it’s wrong, we’ll learn from our mistake and move on.”

Any company could adopt those managerial techniques tomorrow, at least in theory. Far more difficult to adopt, and perhaps more important to Intuit’s self-disruptive success, is a culture that facilitates reinvention. A key element is permission to admit mistakes, shortcomings, and failures, which is valuable in two ways.

First, when an organization tries to change, it is implicitly admitting something isn’t working. No organization wants to admit that. People get punished when something isn’t working, right? And if no one will go there, change is forever blocked. Change gets unblocked when top managers routinely admit their mistakes. In 2009, when Smith had been CEO for a year, he presided over a dinner for about 100 people in engineering and product design, including some from other companies. “Brad gave a talk and said, ‘Here are the things I screwed up on,’?” Cook recalls. “It was hard to imagine any other CEO giving that talk.” In 2015 the company raised prices on its desktop TurboTax products, and customers revolted. The business’s leader, Sasan Goodarzi, said, “?‘I own this decision. I had no idea this would happen, and I’m sorry to you all. Here’s why we did it,’?” reports a witness. “It made a big impact.” Goodarzi is still at Intuit and widely considered a rising star. Every company says it wants to learn from mistakes, not punish them, but few companies live that way.

The second advantage of an open, fess up culture is subtly different. Remember those performance reviews and feedback reports taped up outside Smith’s office? They’re Smith’s proclamations that he himself must change. When top leaders admit that they must fix their flaws, it’s hard for others to claim that they or their business unit are beyond improvement.

The temptation to leave things alone is powerful right now, with Intuit performing so well. Yet the company faces sobering risks. The most obvious is a data breach. If you use TurboTax and QuickBooks, Intuit knows your Social Security number, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, everything about your brokerage accounts, and your children’s names, among other things. Consumers rank Intuit No. 8 among all companies for privacy trustworthiness in the latest survey by the Ponemon Institute research firm, just behind HP and ahead of PayPal. That’s a titanium-strength competitive advantage, but it could vaporize after a major break-in.

Though Intuit utterly dominates its fields, competitors aren’t giving up. Its most credible competitor is Xero, a New Zealand–based small-business accounting startup. It’s a minor factor in the U.S. and Canada, where Intuit rules; trouble is, Intuit is a minor factor in the rest of the world. Intuit is belatedly going global, and because its software is available as a service in the cloud, it has at least a few customers in 180 countries. But most of the planet remains wide open to competitors, and Intuit’s brands aren’t nearly as strong abroad as they are in North America.

There’s even a danger, probably small, that the IRS might become a competitor. Intuit is one of several software companies that in 2003 agreed with the IRS to provide free tax prep and filing for low-income taxpayers; in return, the IRS promised not to offer tax software. That agreement expires in October 2020. The very thought of IRS software probably makes most taxpayers’ blood run cold, but since the prospect of crossing the IRS is even scarier, millions might opt to use such a product.

Intuit, in its disciplined way, is sending scouting parties in search of the next big transformation. Starting last fall, the company grouped 70 of its leaders into small teams and told them to investigate eight major trends that arose in customer interactions and tech forums—how consumers under age 10 use technology, conversational user interfaces, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and more. Their reports sparked still more topics to pursue, all of which—23 in total—have now been investigated Intuit-style, as Smith details: “through 500 follow-me-homes, 225 interviews with everyone from Marc Andreessen to the founders of Airbnb and Uber, and 100 experiments conducted across five continents.”

No company tries harder to find the next big disruption before it finds them. Intuit understands that in the digital world there are no final victories but plenty of final defeats, and success is always tenuous. That’s how a tech oldster lands on the Future 50. As Cook says, Intuit’s current 23-topic initiative is nothing new. It’s what the company does. “It’s another opportunity to change before it’s needed.”

A version of this article appears in the Nov. 1, 2017 issue of Fortune.