Jensen Huang has been obsessive in creating Nvidia
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Sunday should be a day of rest for even the most hard-charging boss. Not for Jensen Huang. As the weekend draws to a close, the man who built microchip designer Nvidia into one the world's most valuable companies likes nothing better than to pour himself a glass of Highland Park – the Scotch whisky favoured by Sir Winston Churchill – and start catching up on hundreds of emails.
Remarkably, Huang will reply to every one of them. That's because these aren't just any old emails. Sent from employees at every level of the company, each contains just five bullet points – called Top 5 Things, or T5Ts. They explain what staff are working on, thinking about or have noticed about the business.
Topics can range from the latest machine-learning trends in artificial intelligence – Nvidia dominates the market for advanced chips that drive the AI revolution – to competitor insights or customer pinch points. The pithy emails – and his equally concise replies – are a vital way for Huang to keep tabs on what is going on inside Nvidia. They also ensure he's getting key information from the coalface that might otherwise evade him.
It's a unique management style that sets Huang apart from his peers. His unconventional approach is 'the exact opposite' of what is considered best practice in most of the rest of corporate America, says Tae Kim, author of a new book, The Nvidia Way. As companies get bigger, they tend to adopt ever-steeper hierarchies. Managers are detached from staff and increasingly rely on formal status updates from underlings to take the pulse of a company.
