Huang is known for his unusual approach to hierarchy and management. — AFP
However well you did in 2024, you probably didn’t have as good a year as Jensen Huang. As co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, the company making the chips powering the AI boom, Huang saw his firm’s stock price triple and his net worth jump nearly US$80bil this year.
And that’s just the hard numbers. Fellow CEOs gush over Huang. Mark Zuckerberg called him “Taylor Swift, but for tech”. Tech industry analysts refer to him as a “rock star”. The media in Huang’s native Taiwan even coined the term “Jensanity” to describe the adulation inspired by the Nvidia boss.
All of which suggests Huang knows something about how to be an excellent leader. In his new book The Nvidia Way, journalist and long-time Nvidia watcher Tae Kim interviewed veteran Nvidia employees, executives, and the company’s co-founders to identify Huang’s secret sauce.
In a long recent interview with The Asianometry Newsletter, Kim shared tons of details from his reporting. If, like Zuckerberg, you are a true Huang fanboy (or girl), it’s well worth a read in full. But for entrepreneurs looking for quick, actionable insights to steal from the Nvidia boss to improve their own leadership in 2025, may I suggest Huang’s “top five emails” system.
How Jensen Huang battles bureaucracy
Huang is known for his unusual approach to hierarchy and management. Unlike a typical CEO, he has 60 direct reports, largely refuses to do one-on-ones, and takes a radically transparent approach to sharing information with his team.
His goal, he recently explained at a Stanford talk, is to build a company ”designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible, for people to be empowered.” Speed and excellence are the goals. Politics, bureaucracy, and information hoarding are the enemy. And as Kim explains, how Huang uses email has a big role to play in accomplishing these aims.
“Jensen loves email and is constantly on it. To this day, people who left Nvidia 20 years ago can email him, and he’ll instantly respond, often within a minute. When Blackberry came out, he was on it constantly,” Kim reports.
How the ‘top five emails’ system works
Plenty of CEOs are email obsessives. What sets Huang apart is not how much he emails, but whom he emails — and who emails him. Kim details how Huang created something he calls the “top five emails” to help break through the bureaucracy and BS that often build up at big companies.
“In most companies, as they grow, managers create status reports, and those reports are cleaned up by layers of management to remove anything negative. By the time the CEO sees it, the report is often useless and doesn’t help steer the company,” Kim notes. At Nvidia, Huang has set things up so that he has more direct access to frontline information.
“Every week or two, every employee writes an email to their team, manager, and various distribution lists that Jensen can access. These emails outline the top five things they’re working on or the top five things they’ve observed. It could be a major competitor’s move, a new technology, or a cool AI paper,” says Kim.
“Jensen reads hundreds of these emails every day,” he continues. “This gives him the pulse of what’s happening across the company. No one can hide whether things are going well or poorly.”
Huang will also often shoot off quick replies to the authors of these emails asking for more information or an update.
A leadership hack any entrepreneur can steal
There are plenty of aspects of Nvidia’s unique culture that might be difficult for other leaders to quickly borrow. The company is reportedly stuffed with brilliant and fiercely loyal employees. You can’t build that kind of culture overnight. Nor can you radically reorganise your org chart from one day to the next.
But just about anyone can walk into the office next week and start implementing the “top five emails” system. All you need is to create a few email distribution lists and send out a memo or conduct an all-hands explaining the move.
Will this possibly involve more work on your part as the leader to read and respond to these emails? Sure. No one is claiming Huang runs a relaxed lifestyle business from the beach in Bali.
“[Huang] has this email culture where he can send quick emails very quickly, all day long, and he works more than anyone else,” Kim allows. But while the effort is real, Nvidia’s incredible success suggests so are the payoffs.
If you’re looking for a way to clear out bureaucracy, allow information to flow more freely, and have a better view of what’s actually going on at your company in the coming year, giving Jensen Huang’s “top five emails” system a try might just be worth the extra work. – Inc./Tribune News Service
