Former Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang avoided unnecessary meetings, prioritizing efficiency over routine check-ins. Even with, at one point, 60 direct reports, he refused to catch up. Now that he has resigned, the question is whether his successor (currently Colette Kress who served as interim) will retain power.
Speaking at Stanford University, Huang once revealed his aversion to frequent catch-ups. “I don’t do one-on-ones with any of them,” he said.
Huang argued that frequent meetings would clutter his schedule. He added that they would also harm the ability of the team as a whole to meet challenges, work effectively and remain transparent.
“They never hear me tell them anything, it’s just so they know,” he said. “There is not a single piece of information that I secretly disclose to staff; I do not communicate it to the rest of the company.”
“In this way, our company was designed for agility. For information to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they can do, not by what they know,” he added.
But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have time for his team. Huang insisted he stays in regular contact with his executives. They simply didn’t need to set aside time in their schedules to be on the same page.
“I’m not writing any criticism of any of them,” he added. “I give them constant feedback and they give me the same.”
And when an employee really needed a moment of his time, Huang insisted he would “drop everything for them.”
Colette Kress shares Jensen Huang’s affinity for efficiency
CFO Colette Kress takes Huang’s place (for now). The interim CEO, whose net worth is estimated at $1.2 billion according to Forbesholds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
After nearly three decades in finance roles at companies including Texas Instruments, Cisco and Microsoft, she joined Nvidia in September 2013.
Since then, she has guided the company’s finances through a significant transformation, from a company largely focused on video game hardware to a chipmaking powerhouse at the center of the AI boom – and seen its market capitalization soar from around $9 billion to, at its peak, $5 trillion. Its amount has since fallen below $4 trillion following Huang’s announcement.
She did not reveal whether she would also give up one-on-ones. But the 59-year-old, who spent 13 years as Huang’s right-hand man in Nvidia’s finances, appears to share his affinity for efficiency.
“We don’t waste a day, we don’t lose a dime,” Kress said in 2024. “And those two things are really important to us, our agility to move fast, but our ability to not waste things along the way.”
Leaders agree: unnecessary meetings are pointless
Huang isn’t the first executive to say that meetings aren’t the best use of time.
Former Pandora CEO Alexander Lacik said Fortune too many meetings result in every department or business issue receiving “the same attention” whether it needs it or not. He limited his catch-ups with management.
“There are only one, two, three activities that generate disproportionate value and the rest is just background noise,” he said. “As time goes on and I get closer to the end of my career, I’m a lot clearer about trying to fit in where I have a big impact.”
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby limits his meetings to four hours a day and wants the ones he attends to be “quick” and “almost all conversational.”
E-commerce giant Shopify has gone a step further and eliminated all meetings involving more than two people in 2023, as part of a company-wide “calendar purge” intended to give employees more time to work on other tasks.
And even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – a big fan of “messy meetings” – imposes a strict protocol to ensure they’re actually useful, with a six-page memo instead of a PowerPoint (because they’re too vague) and half an hour set aside at the start of the meeting to read it silently together before having “a really elevated discussion.”
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on June 12, 2024.
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