Over recent years, Brad Smith’s team at Intuit could never be sure whether they would come to work to find him in a blue suit, a suit of armor, a 1920s wool swimsuit or an Elvis costume— his wardrobe choice depended on what sales or product launch goal the team accomplished.

In 2006, when he was senior vice president of Intuit’s Small Business Division, he told his team he would put on a 1920s bathing suit and jump in a pond if they met the launch deadline for the latest version of QuickBooks. His team met the deadline, and he took the leap.

“I’ve done a number of things in the spirit of employee motivation,” says Smith, 44, who was named CEO in January 2008. “I tend to be a storyteller and a student of history. I often tell stories of great battles, like the battle of Thermopylae, to inspire teams who face what appear to be insurmountable odds. And yes, I have been known to don costumes ranging from a Roman soldier to Elvis Presley as a reward for a job well done.”

During another particularly challenging launch, Smith huddled Intuit managers at a retreat to develop quick-thinking strategies to counteract Microsoft’s release of a competitive product 60 days before the latest QuickBooks edition was due out. Everyone received a copy of the graphic novel 300 based on the battle of Thermopylae to inspire them in their efforts to maintain market dominance in accounting software over software giant Microsoft.

Intuit managers developed a pre-announcement strategy code-named “Rolling Thunder.” The goal was to convey to potential customers that QuickBooks’ new version was worth the 60-day wait, even as Intuit shared the airwaves with Microsoft as it announced its new product.

“Rolling Thunder” worked. QuickBooks-related revenue jumped to $861.7 million in fiscal year 2006, the year of “Rolling Thunder,” which was 14 percent above the previous year.

“Beyond the costumes and storytelling, I find that one of the most powerful motivators is defining clear goals, and giving employees the resources and decision-making authority to do what they do every day—deliver their best effort to make a difference,” Smith says. “At Intuit, we’ve introduced concepts like unstructured time to enable individuals and small teams to be entrepreneurial and identify new processes or product ideas.”

When Smith became CEO at Intuit, known for its financial programs Quicken, TurboTax and QuickBooks, he brought a strong desire to foster creativity and innovation among employees, and to reach out to the company’s stakeholders and stay ahead of market trends. His promotion came at a time of re-branding, as the 25-year-old Intuit looked forward to its next quarter century. “It’s a different world than when we started as a company in 1983, and we’ll need to do things differently if we want to be one of the world’s most innovative, fastest-growing companies,” Smith tells SUCCESS.

“When I transitioned into the CEO role, one of my primary goals was to learn what our stakeholders were thinking about,” he says. “I went on a listening tour, talking to our board of directors, other CEOs in Silicon Valley and our investors. I also spent time in small groups with more than 300 of our customer-facing employees.

“I primarily asked three questions: ‘What do you see as Intuit’s biggest untapped opportunity, what is the biggest risk facing Intuit that keeps you up at night, and what is the biggest mistake I can make as a CEO in my first year?’ There was a wealth of learning and consistency from what I heard that helped frame the priorities for my first year as CEO,” Smith says. “To paraphrase Mark Twain, ‘A wise man learns from his own mistakes, but a genius learns from others.’ ”

Priorities that emerged included making Intuit a more global company, especially with 37 percent of its customers already doing business globally, and accelerating growth and innovation, Smith says.

“There were four major shifts occurring in the market that would require us to change: demographic shifts with the emergence of the digital generation entering the work force; the impact of social networks and user-contribution systems to add value to products and services; the accelerating growth rates of SaaS [software as a service] and mobile devices as a means to get things done; and a world increasingly without borders,” Smith says. “Those four tenets became the core of our new growth strategy and how we will continue to make our offerings even better in the future.”

Less than 90 days after taking over as CEO, Smith announced the launch of Intuit’s new product services. In addition to producing software for laptops and desktops, Intuit’s new services included software that offered increased connectivity and could be downloaded onto mobile devices. Now, a customer shopping for groceries could instantly input the bill into Quicken, and a business owner could pick up a purchase and instantly add the expenditure into his record-keeping system via a mobile version of QuickBooks.

Customers helped institute some software changes. In a program called “Follow Me Home,” in which customers allow Intuit to observe them at home and at work, team members saw how a customer doing global invoicing had to import/export data several times between QuickBooks and Excel, which led to the addition of the multicurrency feature in QuickBooks 2009.

After Intuit’s re-branding, revenue from May to July 2008 was 11 percent higher than the final fiscal quarter of 2007, with total revenue for 2008 topping $3 billion.

Smith says his desire to learn as much as possible through his listening tour was influenced by his education at Marshall University in West Virginia. There he learned “you didn’t have to have all the answers, but you had to know what questions to ask.” Smith has continued to give back to his alma mater as a mentor to students. While teaching them to follow their dreams, he’s also gaining knowledge about the digital generation.

Wearing his class ring every day as a reminder of where he’s from, Smith recalls how his first employer, a Fortune 500 company, sent him to a communications school to drill the West Virginia accent out of him. He maintained the accent, as well as a strong appreciation for the individual, and the strengths and talents each employee contributes to a company.

In his personal life, Smith enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters. He practices karate and plays the saxophone. His favorite charities are those helping young children with special needs and those advancing educational programs, such as Donors Choose.

At work, Smith takes time to inspire and encourage his employees. “I encourage our employees to seize every opportunity to move into areas where they have little or no domain expertise and are forced to rely on the power of inquiry and learning to be successful,” he says. “In today’s world, things change rapidly and positions don’t come with instructions. The ability to learn, adapt and execute is critical.”