Jensen Huang Doesn’t Do One-on-Ones

I have a man crush on Jensen Huang. Let me just put that out there.

He’s of course built NVIDIA into an industry juggernaut over the last three decades, however, his anti-corporate thinking and common sense approach to business is far more interesting. Jensen’s now famous interview at Stanford during which he wished “pain and suffering” on all the graduates was fascinating to hear a Fortune 100 CEO say out loud. There were gems like this:

“Most Stanford graduates have very high expectations. People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success.”

Love this. Too much of what we hear from corporate America, and even startup America for that matter, extoll the virtues of just loving what you do, being happy and comfortable, having work/life balance. All the time. Jensen calls bullshit on this and adjusts this expectation to remind us that hard work and grit are also part of the equation.

Another one of his interviews recently caught my attention. He sat down with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison to discuss leadership in the age of AI. This part of the discussion particularly resonated with me:

"I really discourage one-on-ones" - Jensen Huang, CEO NVIDIA

Wait, what? He really discourages one-on-one meetings with his leadership teams? One-on-ones are sacred pillars of every modern company’s workflow. This again goes completely against traditional management practices. There are HBR articles, whitepapers, and even entire books dedicated to the topic of running effective one-on-one meetings.

Although this approach may realistically not work for every organization, it does highlight the importance of keeping communication lines as open as possible for the entire organization— not just a select few individuals. Ensuring that all teams know what’s going on is vital, especially for high growth companies. To paraphrase Jensen, understanding business challenges, problems people are trying to solve, the direction the company is trying to go in, what is and isn’t working: this is information everybody should be able to hear.

Imagine hearing Jensen’s voice as well as that of his key team members every week, quickly recapping what’s going on at NVIDIA. That, combined with his leather jacket, would officially make him the coolest CEO on the planet.

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