Nvidia and conventional wisdom
In a recent interview, Jensen HUANG, the CEO of NVIDIA, is challenged on how he manages his team:
- [Interviewer] How large is your leadership team?
- [JH] Nvidia's leadership team is 60 plus... 60 people.
- And they all report to you?
- Yeah, they all report to me. 60 direct reports...
- Which is not conventionally considered a best practice? (laughs) I agree that the best practice...
- (Interrupts the interviewer) I'm certain that's the best practice... I'm certain it's the best practice. It's not conventional, but I am certain it's the best practice. I believe that your contribution to the work should not be based on privileged access to information. I don't do one-on-ones, and my staff is quite large, and I say almost everything that I say to everybody at the same time. And the reason for that is because I don't really believe there's any information that I operate on that somehow only one or two people should hear about.
Two reflections about this short snippet:
- The (smart) interviewer's conventional wisdom doesn't mean much for the CEO of a company that, within a few years, weighs about the same as the full Euronext Paris stock exchange. Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be a lot of awareness that becoming one of the largest and most influential companies on the planet might not come from applying conventional wisdom. (And I'm not even bothering going back to how much emptiness there might be in our usual business 'conventional wisdom.')
- The idea of having a large direct reporting team for the CEO is quite interesting in itself. The fact that Jensen somehow says that he doesn't play political mind games with his direct staff and that he prefers to be as open as possible about critical information for them might shock quite a few corporate leaders. It might also explain to some degree how NVIDIA can build focus rapidly and be as proactive as they've been these last ten years on such complex and rapidly shifting markets.
Correlating full transparency to business and strategic reactivity is quite an interesting concept.
The full (short) video here:
EDIT: I just realized that the interviewer is actually Patrick COLLISON, the CEO of STRIPE, an amazingly successful company in its own right. 😆
