Management Secrets That Created The World's Most Valuable Company --- All 30,000 Nvidia employees are expected to send regular emails to their boss, CEO Jensen Huang. He reads them -- and they're essential to his success

"Every morning, the man who built one of the world's most valuable companies scrolls through his inbox and looks at 100 of the most important emails that he'll see all day. And on Sunday nights, he pours himself a glass of his favorite Scotch and reads even more of them.

For decades, Nvidia employees have been sending notes known as T5Ts, or Top-5 Things -- things they're working on, things they're thinking about, things they're noticing in their corners of the business.

And for decades, Jensen Huang has been reading them. All of them.

"If you send it," he says, "I'll read it."

The founder and chief executive of Nvidia reads them to keep the pulse of the company and make absolutely sure that he's getting the sort of insights that might never reach him otherwise.

He's been doing this since before his startup became a trillion-dollar company by selling the chips powering the AI revolution, long before he was Silicon Valley's reigning philosopher-king and even before he had an entire wardrobe of black leather jackets. Over the years, Top-5 Things emails have become his preferred method of flattening hierarchy and something of an organizing principle for the whole company.

It's a clever and incredibly effective management strategy -- and one I'll explain in more detail later in this column. As it turns out, it's also classic Jensen Huang.

"Jensen's management style is unlike anything else in corporate America," Tae Kim writes in "The Nvidia Way," his illuminating new book about the company.

The book offers a peek behind the curtain at one of the most important and idiosyncratic companies in the world today. Founded in a Denny's booth more than three decades ago, Nvidia is now worth as much as Apple and Microsoft, and it's the single-best performing stock in the S&P 500 over the past decade.

And not just because of its chips. Nvidia is more successful than anybody could have imagined because of its charismatic leader.

Kim, a senior writer for Barron's, makes the case that Nvidia is a product of both Huang's business genius and the ingenious way he structured his business -- a "unique organizational design and work culture," he writes, that allows the company to move at what Huang calls the speed of light. (Barron's, like The Wall Street Journal, is published by Dow Jones.)

His book is loaded with fascinating details about Huang's unusual leadership style and maniacal work habits.

Instead of cloistering himself in a private office, he prefers to work from conference rooms. He does his best thinking at the whiteboard, which he uses so frequently that he has a favorite brand of marker that is only sold in Taiwan. He remembers all of the company's near-death experiences and believes its fiercest competition is complacency -- which is why the 61-year-old remains a workaholic. He says he doesn't remember movies he's seen because he's just thinking about work the whole time. And he rarely takes vacations, but Nvidia employees dread when he does, Kim reports, because that's when he works even more.

But no matter how hard he works, there's only so much he can do to dictate the strategy of a company that he's led since the very beginning.

"Strategy, it turns out, isn't what I say. It's what they do," Huang said at an AI summit last year. "So it's really important that I understand what everybody is doing."

He does that by reading Top-5 Things emails.

T5T emails began as a solution to a surprisingly tricky problem. Huang is allergic to the bureaucracy that infects organizations as they get bigger. But as his startup grew, he "needed to somehow keep tabs on what was going on inside Nvidia in order to make sure everyone had the right priorities," Kim writes.

This turned out to be harder than etching billions of transistors on a silicon wafer.

The documents that make it to a typical CEO tend to get so watered down along the way that they're liable to leave a puddle on his desk. Huang doesn't bother with any of them. He doesn't believe in formal strategic planning or status reports, either. "Status reports are meta-information by the time you get them," Huang said last year. "They're barely informative."

He doesn't want information that has already made its way through layers of management. What he wants is "information from the edge," he said last month in a public interview with Laurene Powell Jobs.

The way he solved this problem was by asking roughly 30,000 employees at every level of the company to send regular emails to their teams and executives that even the CEO can access.

Which he does -- every single day.

They're usually brief and include a few bullet points, and glancing at them gives Huang a snapshot of what's happening inside Nvidia, Kim writes.

It might just be the only way he can get the sort of unvarnished truth that nobody wants to give the CEO but every CEO needs to get. After all, Nvidia's employees are not telling Huang what they think he wants to hear. They're just telling him things.

T5T emails became a "crucial feedback channel" for Huang, Kim writes, because they allowed him to pick up on trends that were obvious to junior employees, even when top executives were completely oblivious.

"I'm looking to detect the weak signals," he says, according to Kim. "It's easy to pick up the strong signals, but I want to intercept them when they are weak."

His record of peeking around corners, looking into the future and placing massive bets makes Huang one of the savviest gamblers in business history. In fact, one of the weak signals that he intercepted years ago was a wonky but exciting development in machine learning that kept popping up in T5T emails. Huang decided that Nvidia needed to invest more in tools for accelerating workloads on its graphics-processing units. That decision clearly paid off. These days, those GPUs are the brains of artificial intelligence.

When employees send their emails, they know Huang will see them -- and he might even reply.

One of my favorite tidbits from Kim's book is that Nvidia's executives learned not to send T5T emails on Friday nights because Huang's prompt responses would inevitably ruin their weekends. So they developed a habit of sending them on Sundays. That way, he would read them over a glass of single-malt Highland Park Scotch and they could get cranking first thing Monday morning.

This is his idea of a relaxing Sunday night. When you're watching TV, he's reading T5Ts.

And not everything in those emails is about the latest advances in machine learning. Huang likes to say that anything can be a Top-5 Thing.

"If you found a restaurant and they have excellent fried chicken," he said last month, "I want to know."

But he's not digesting these emails because he's in the market for dinner recs. He's looking for the next zero-billion-dollar market -- a frontier that hasn't been explored because it barely exists but could one day be, well, a thing.

Not every CEO is so visionary, and not every company makes the most precious resource on the planet, but Kim believes anyone can take lessons from Huang's success at Nvidia.

"I think the way he was able to create this culture and effectively manage his company should be copied by everyone," Kim told me. "Not in the exact same way, but I think they can learn from what he does."

Including one thing he doesn't do: Huang might just be the only person at Nvidia who doesn't send out a T5T email. If he did, it would be counterproductive. Everyone's things would soon look remarkably similar to his -- and he would have no reason to read them.

"I have my own Top-5 Things," he says, "that I keep to myself."" [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- Science of Success: Management Secrets That Created The World's Most Valuable Company --- All 30,000 Nvidia employees are expected to send regular emails to their boss, CEO Jensen Huang. He reads them -- and they're essential to his success. Cohen, Ben.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 14 Dec 2024: B.2.