The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant

by Tae Kim

In exchange for that level of accountability, PICs were granted the weight of Jensen’s authority and received priority support throughout the organization. After Jensen organized Nvidia’s employees into groups centralized by function—sales, engineering, operations, and so on—they were treated as a general pool of talent and not divided by business units or divisions. This allowed the people with the right skills to be assigned to projects on an ad hoc basis. It also helped mitigate some of the ever-present job insecurity that plagues corporate America. “Nvidia doesn’t constantly fire people and rehire them,” said Jay Puri, head of global field operations.12 “We take people that we have and we are able to redirect them into a new mission.” Managers at Nvidia were trained not to get territorial or feel like they “own” their people and instead got used to them moving around between task groups. This practice removed one of the main sources of friction at large companies.