With the AI chip company’s stock skyrocketing, Huang has also seen his fame — and fortune — grow, and there are plenty of eyes on him to see how he runs one of the world’s biggest companies.
Manage a lot of people
Huang believes a CEO should have more direct reports than anyone else in an organization. He, in fact, has more than 50 direct reports, considered an unusually high number for any manager.
“The more direct reports the CEO has, the less layers are in the company,” Huang said in an interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit in 2023. “It allows us to keep information fluid, allows us to make sure that everyone is empowered by information.”
Management exists “in service of all the other people that work at the company,” he said in a separate interview with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business earlier this year.
“I don’t believe in a culture, in an environment, where the information you possess is the reason why you have power,” he said.
Skip the 1:1 meetings
Huang has said he doesn’t have one-on-one meetings with his many direct reports.
“Almost everything that I say, I say to everybody all at the same time,” he said at Stripe Sessions 2024. “I don’t really believe there’s any information that I operate on that somehow only one or two people should hear about.”
Give feedback publicly
In the same vein, Huang also believes in giving someone feedback in front of their peers.
“The problem I have with one-on-ones and taking feedback aside is you deprive a whole bunch of people that same learning,” he said at Stripe Sessions. “Feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn this?”
He added the learning from other people’s mistakes is “the best way to learn.
“Why learn from your own mistakes? Why learn from your own embarrassment? You’ve got to learn from other people’s embarrassment,” he said.
Communicate briefly and often
Nvidia employees can expect to receive a lot of emails from their chief executive. Huang sends his staff hundreds of emails a day, many of which are only a few words long, The New Yorker reported last year.
He expects employees to keep their email communications just as concise.
One former Nvidia worker told Business Insider’s Jyoti Mann that “you’d get in trouble for sending a super-long email to him.”
“The idea was to nail down what you have to say, send it, and if he, or others, need more information, then it’s a conversation, not another email,” the former Nvidian said.
Show your work
Huang believes showing others how you reason through a problem is “empowering.”
“I show people how to reason through things all the time — strategy things, how to forecast something, how to break a problem down, and you’re just empowering people all over the place,” he said in the Stanford Graduate School of Business interview.
He continued: “If you send me something and you want my input on it and I can be of service to you and in my review of it, share with you how I reasoned through it, I’ve made a contribution to you. I’ve made it possible to see how I reason through something.”
That can lead to a lightbulb moment.
“You go, ‘Oh my gosh. That’s how you reason through something like this. It’s not as complicated as it seems.'”
Read the full article here
