Nvidia's Management Secret: Top Five Things

(Bennett / aol photo)

Founders of world-class companies each have their distinguishing management characteristics--think Steve Jobs' perfectionism, Bill Gates' ruthlessness, and Elon Musk's first principles. Jensen Huang's is T5T (Top Five Things):

T5T emails began as a solution to a surprisingly tricky problem. Huang is allergic to the bureaucracy that infects organizations as they get bigger. But as his startup grew, he “needed to somehow keep tabs on what was going on inside Nvidia in order to make sure everyone had the right priorities,” [“The Nvidia Way" author Tae] Kim writes.

This turned out to be harder than etching billions of transistors on a silicon wafer.

The documents that make it to a typical CEO tend to get so watered down along the way that they’re liable to leave a puddle on his desk. Huang doesn’t bother with any of them. He doesn’t believe in formal strategic planning or status reports, either. “Status reports are meta-information by the time you get them,” Huang said last year. “They’re barely informative.”

He doesn’t want information that has already made its way through layers of management. What he wants is “information from the edge,” he said last month in a public interview with Laurene Powell Jobs.

The way he solved this problem was by asking roughly 30,000 employees at every level of the company to send regular emails to their teams and executives that even the CEO can access. Which he does—every single day. They’re usually brief and include a few bullet points, and glancing at them gives Huang a snapshot of what’s happening inside Nvidia, Kim writes.

It might just be the only way he can get the sort of unvarnished truth that nobody wants to give the CEO but every CEO needs to get. After all, Nvidia’s employees are not telling Huang what they think he wants to hear. They’re just telling him things.

T5T emails became a “crucial feedback channel” for Huang, Kim writes, because they allowed him to pick up on trends that were obvious to junior employees, even when top executives were completely oblivious.

All the aforementioned founders have been called workaholics because they don't make the mistake of over-delegation. Over-delegation tempts them to coast on their marketplace dominance, which dissipates often invisibly because they took their foot off the gas.

Through T5T Jensen Huang seems to have found an efficient way to access uncurated information flowing through his vast organization, but he still has to work around the clock. May he remain at Nvidia's helm for many years.