NVIDIA has had an unusual few quarters in which its valuation has surged making it the world’s second most valuable company, and the company is operated in unusual ways as well.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that he doesn’t have regular meetings with his direct staff. “I try not to have regular meetings — regular operational meetings,” he said in an interview. “I’ve got amazing people in the company who are doing regular operational meetings. CEO’s should be pinch hitters. We should be working on the things that nobody else can or nobody else is,” he added.
“And so you’re jumping into projects that are stuck or off track or new ideas wherever we can move the needle,” Huang said. He added that he doesn’t take any meetings which are just about getting regular reports. “No reporting, no reporting meetings. I hate reporting meetings,” he said.
Huang says that he instead takes meetings where he can help his teams fix problems and find solutions. “Problem meetings or idea meetings or brainstorming meetings or creation meetings or whatever it is, those are the meetings I go to,” he added.
Huang said that this means that his calendar isn’t as full as one would expect for the CEO of the world’s second most valuable company. “I try really hard not to have outlook manage my life and so we purposefully decide what kind of things that we want to do, we want to work on. And so I try to live a life of purpose and I manage my time accordingly,” he says.
It is perhaps for the best that Jensen Huang doesn’t take regular reporting meetings. Huang famously has as many as 40 people reporting directly to him, so perhaps regular reporting meetings aren’t an option for him anyway — if he were to take reporting meetings, that was all he’d ever do as CEO. Huang though, seems to only attend meetings when he’s needed, and where his expertise can benefit his team. And that’s perhaps the way that he can add most value in his rapidly growing company.