Jensen Huang doesn’t schedule one-on-one meetings with the people who report to him — but that doesn’t mean he has no time for them.
The billionaire Nvidia CEO and co-founder revealed that aspect of his managerial style during a talk at Stanford University in March. Huang said he has a management team of 55 people, all directly reporting to him — in a structure “designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible.”
That means no unnecessary meetings, including regular check-ins with direct reports. “Unless they need me,” he said. “Then I’ll drop everything for them.”
Plenty of CEOs have go-to tactics when it comes to meetings. Steve Jobs was a fan of walking meetings. Jeff Bezos has espoused many ideas over the years, from banning PowerPoints and always speaking last to encouraging “messy meetings,” where people can bounce ideas off each other without a set ending time.
“When I sit down [in] a meeting, I don’t know how long the meeting is going to take if we’re trying to solve a problem,” Bezos told the “Lex Fridman Podcast” last year. “The reality is, we may have to [let our minds] wander for a long time … I think there’s certainly nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spit-balling and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth.”
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In Huang’s case, scheduling 55 recurring one-on-one meetings could fill up a calendar quickly. That might pose a logistical problem for the head of the world’s second-most valuable public company. On Wednesday, the chipmaker central to the rise of artificial intelligence eclipsed Apple in market cap, ranking behind only Microsoft.
Instead, he and his executives communicate enough throughout each workday to stay on the same page without needing meetings, he said. The approach even extends to performance reviews, he added: “I write no reviews for any of them. I give them constant reviews and they provide the same to me.”
A fully booked planner carries psychological ramifications, too, Yale University psychology professor Laurie Santos said at SXSW in March. The dread you experience when you feel like you’re too busy is called “time famine,” and it can lead to low productivity, poor work performance and burnout, she said.
To fend it off, Santos suggested going through your to-do list and figuring out which items don’t actually need to be scheduled. She also advised consciously celebrating your time savings, like the minutes you regain when a phone call ends early or the hour you get back when someone cancels a meeting.
“I think we feel strapped for time because we think working … as much as we work all the time is essential for achieving the things we want to achieve in life,” Santos said.
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