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

by Tae Kim

As Jensen put it, “you want a company that’s as large as necessary to do the job well, but to be as small as possible,” and not bogged down by overmanagement and processes. To get there, he decided that rather than rely on a permanent class of professional managers, whose only job was to be in charge of things, he would create a far more fluid system that would orient Nvidia around its business goals. And even as he took the long view, he would get rid of the practice of long-term strategic planning, which would force the company to stick to a particular path even if there were reasons to deviate from it. “Strategy is not words. Strategy is action,” he said. “We don’t do a periodic planning system. The reason for that is because the world is a living, breathing thing. We just plan continuously. There’s no five-year plan.” He began to tell his employees that their ultimate boss was the mission itself. The idea was to make decisions for the good of the customer, not to boost the career of the executive above them. “The concept of the mission is the boss makes a lot of sense because ultimately we’re here to realize a particular mission, not in service of some organization,” Jensen said.10 “It got people thinking about the work and not the organization. The work, not the hierarchy.” Under the “mission is the boss” philosophy, Jensen would start every new project by designating a leader, or a “Pilot in Command” (PIC), who would report directly to Jensen. He found that this crea...