Review: The Nvidia Way

 The Nvidia Way is another book about Jensen Huang and Nvidia. It was recommended to me after I read The Thinking Machine, and I found it a much better book. Rather than trying to be a biography of Jensen Huang, this book focused more on his management style and how Nvidia is run.

The interesting thing about a very flat structure is that the CEO has to work very hard. To the point where he would be responding to emails all weekend every weekend. Of course, one side effect of this was that his staff would wait to send status reports on Sunday night so that when his responses came it'd be during the work week so they could do it on work time rather than personal time.

The other comment that kept coming up all through the text were employees commenting on how free of politics NVidia was. The key point here was that NVidia would reassign employees on the basis of priority rather than allow managers to maintain fiefdoms. This effectively made all the managers learn to work with each other and cooperate rather than pick political fights.

Another key point is the lack of planning:

he would get rid of the practice of long-term strategic planning, which would force the company to stick to a particular path even if there were reasons to deviate from it. “Strategy is not words. Strategy is action,” he said. “We don’t do a periodic planning system. The reason for that is because the world is a living, breathing thing. We just plan continuously. There’s no five-year plan.” (kindle loc 2650)

Of course they have plans. No chip manufacturer (even one that does outsourcing) have to have plans, but the willingness to adapt and change those plans within a quarter is key. Another key point that comes across is that NVidia had no magic tricks or short cuts. 60 hour weeks were the norm and people regularly put in 80 hour weeks. That's demanding and probably the culture selects out people who aren't willing to put in that level of commitment.

I particularly enjoyed the way Icahn described how executives get selected for incompetence:

Icahn observed that competent executives often get sidelined in favor of more likeable but less capable ones because of behavioral incentives inside companies. The personalities who ascend the corporate ranks resemble college fraternity presidents. They become friendly with the board of directors and are not threatening to the current CEO. They’re not prodigies, but they’re affable, always available for a drink when you are feeling down. As Icahn put it, these figures (they are mostly men) are “not the smartest, not the brightest, not the best, but likeable and sort of reliable.”  (kindle loc 2804)

To the extent that NVidia avoided promoting that kind of person, it all comes down to Jensen Huang. As far as I can tell from reading this book, however, Huang does not have a designated successor or a grooming program for future CEOs at NVidia. It will be interesting to see how long NVidia can sustain it's advantage going forward, since as the book frequently points out, Huang is the longest running CEO of a major tech company in the business, outlasting Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and many other luminaries.

In any case, I was surprised that I found this book interesting even though I'd just recently finished reading an NVidia book. Recommended.