Former Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Huang famously avoided unnecessary meetings, prioritizing efficiency over routine check-ins. Even with, at one point, 60 direct reports, he refused to do catch-ups. Now that he’s resigned, the question is whether his successor (currently Colette Kress who has stepped up on an interim basis) will keep the rule.
Speaking at Stanford University, Huang once disclosed his aversion to frequent catch-ups. “I don’t do one-on-ones with any of them,” he said.
Huang argued frequent meetings would clutter his schedule. He said they would also get in the way of the broader team’s ability to address challenges, work effectively, and stay transparent.
“They never hear me say something to them, that is only for them to know,” he said. “There’s not one piece of information that I somehow secretly tell the staff; I don’t tell the rest of the company.”
“In that way, our company was designed for agility. For information to be to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know,” he added.
But that doesn’t mean he had no time for his team. Huang insisted he still regularly caught up with his executives. They just didn’t need to set time aside in their diaries to be on the same page.
“I write no reviews for any of them,” he added. “I give them constant reviews and they provide the same to me.”
And when an employee genuinely needed a moment of his time, Huang insisted he’d “drop everything for them.”
Colette Kress shares Jensen Huang’s affinity for efficiency
Stepping into Huang’s shoes (for now) is CFO Colette Kress. The interim CEO, who has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion according to Forbes, holds a bachelor’s in finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
After nearly three decades’ worth of financial roles at companies such as Texas Instruments, Cisco, and Microsoft, she joined Nvidia in September 2013.
Since then, she guided the company’s finances through a significant transformation, from a business largely focused on video game hardware to a chipmaking powerhouse at the center of the AI boom—and watched its market cap soar from about $9 billion to, at its peak, $5 trillion. Its since dropped below $4 trillion upon the news regarding Huang.
She hasn’t revealed whether she’ll ditch one-on-ones too. But the 59-year-old, who has spent 13 years as Huang’s right hand on Nvidia’s finances, seems to share his affinity for efficiency.
“We do not waste a day, we don’t waste a dime,” Kress said in 2024. “And those two things are really important about us, our agility to move fast, but our ability to not waste things along the way.”
Leaders agree: Unnecessary meetings are useless
Huang isn’t the first leader to argue that meetings aren’t the best use of time.
Pandora’s former CEO Alexander Lacik told Fortune too many meetings result in every department or company issue getting “equal attention”—whether or not it needs it. He limited his catch-ups with management.
“There’s only one, two, three activities that actually draw disproportionate value and the rest is just background noise,” he said. “As time has gone by and I’m getting towards the end of my career, I’m much more clear on trying to insert myself where I make a high impact.”
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby caps his meetings at four hours a day, and wants the ones he does attend to be “quick” and “almost all conversational.”
E-commerce giant Shopify took one step further and actually axed all meetingsinvolving more than two people in 2023, in a company-wide “calendar purge” meant to give employees more time to work on other tasks.
And even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—a big fan of “messy meetings”—mandates a strict protocol to ensure they’re actually useful, complete 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 silently read it together before having “a really elevated discussion.”
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on June 12, 2024.
The post Jensen Huang had a strict no one-on-one meetings rule for his 60 direct reports—and Nvidia’s interim CEO has a similar mantra: ‘We don’t waste a dime’ appeared first on Fortune.
