Transcription
Fast forward just a little bit, um, to, uh, the Nvidia of today. So how large is your leadership team? How large is your, your leadership team?
Nvidia's leadership team is 60 plus. 60 people? Yeah. And they all report to you? They, yeah, they all report to me. 60 direct reports? 60 direct reports. Yeah. Which is not conventionally considered a best practice. I agree that the best practice, kind of, I'm certain that's the best practice. It's not conventional, but I'm certain it's the best practice. I'm going, and by the end of this, I'm going to convince all of you to have 60 people on your direct reports. The floor is yours.
Uh, the, the reason, first of all, first of all, the reason is because the layer of hierarchy in your company really matters. Information, uh, really matters. I, I believe that. I believe that your contribution to, uh, to the work should not be based on the privileged access to information. I don't do one-on-ones. And I don't, my, my, uh, staff is quite large, and almost everything that I say, I say to everybody all the same time. And the reason for that is because I don't really believe there's any information that I operate on that, uh, somehow only one or two people should hear about. And this is, this is these are the challenges of the company, or this is the problem I'm trying to solve, or this is the direction we're trying to go into. Um, these are the new endeavors. This isn't working, that's working well, you know. And so all of this type of information, everybody should be able to hear. Now, I love that everybody's working off of the same song sheet. I love that that there is no privileged access to information. I love that we're able to all contribute to solving a problem. And when, when you have 60 people in a room, and often times, well, my staff, my staff meetings are once every other week. Um, it's all based on issues. Whatever issues we have, everybody's there working on it at the same time. Everybody, under, everybody heard the reasoning of the problem. Everybody heard the reasoning of the solution. Everybody heard everything. And so, so that empowers people. I believe that when you give everybody equal access to information, it empowers people. And so that's number one, empowering. Number two, uh, the, if the, if the CEO's direct staff is people, the number of layers you've removed in a company is probably something like seven, you know, depending on how it is. Is it 60 at every layer, or only 60 as in like, if I'm a direct, if I'm one of the fortunate 60, um, do I also have 60 direct reports? No. Or, okay. So I also don't think, I don't think that that's scalable downward. And the reason for that is because you need, you need more and more supervision, uh, depending on, depending on certain levels. And at, at the E-staff level, at the E-staff, if you're so unfortunate to be serving on Nvidia's E-staff, uh, it's very unlikely you need a lot of managerial, you know.
And so I rarely find myself having to, um, you know, stand up for conventional wisdom. Uh, but, uh, if I were to kind of steal man the other side, I'd say, well, one-on-ones are where you provide coaching, where you maybe talk to goals together, personal goals, career advancement, you know, what have you. Um, where maybe you give feedback on something that you see somebody systematically not doing so and so forth. Hey, there's all these things that kind of, when is again, conventionally supposed to do in the one-on-one? Do you not do those things, or do you do them in a different way?
Really good question. I do it right there. I give you feedback right there in front of everybody. And in fact, in fact, this is really a big deal. First of all, feedback is learning. Feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn this? Now, you created the conditions because of some mistake that you made or silliness that you, you brought upon yourself. Um, we should all learn from that opportunity. So you created the conditions, but we should all learn from it. Does that make sense? And so, so for me to explain to you, um, why that doesn't make sense, or how I differ from it, not as half the time I'm not right, but, but for me to reason through it in front of everybody helps everybody learn how to reason through it. And so the issue, the, the, the problem I have with one-on-ones and taking feedback aside is you deprive a whole bunch of people that same learning. Learning from mistakes, other people's mistakes is the best way to learn. Why learn from your own mistakes? You know, why learn from your own embarrassment? You got to learn from other people's embarrassment. That's why we, that's why we have case studies. And isn't that right? We're trying to read from other people's disasters, other people's tragedies. Nothing makes us happier than that.
Have you succeeded in getting other leaders at Nvidia to adopt this practice, or is that, you know, difficult?
I, I give people the opportunity to decide from themselves, but I really discourage one-on-ones. I really discourage one-on-ones. Nothing, nothing is worse than, uh, uh, the idea that somebody says, "Oh, Jensen wants us to do this." Why does that have to be said to anybody? Everybody should know. And so, um, you know, or somebody said, you know, that E-staff said that. Nothing drives me nuttier than that.
You, you once told me that you really didn't like firing people and very seldom did. Can you elaborate on that?
Well, I'd rather, I'd rather improve you than give up, than give up on you. You know, when you fire somebody, you're kind of saying, you're kind of saying, well, you know, a lot of people say, "Well, it, it wasn't your fault," or, "or I made the wrong choice." Or, um, there are very few jobs. Look, I used to clean bathrooms, and now I'm the CEO of a company. I, I think you can learn it. I'm pretty certain you can learn this. And, and there are a lot of things in life that I believe you can learn, and you just have to be given the opportunity to learn it. I had the benefit of watching a lot of smart people do a lot of things. I'm surrounded by 60 people, they're doing smart things all the time, and they, you know, they probably don't realize it, but I'm learning constantly from every single one of them. And, and so I, I don't like giving up on people because I think they could, they could improve. And so there's a, there's, there's it's kind of tongue and cheek, but, but people know that I'd rather torture them into greatness. That, that was the phrase.
That I was, I was hoping to uncover. Yeah. I remember, I remember you mentioned that. Yeah.
So I'd rather torture you into greatness because I believe in you. And I think, I think coaches that, that really believe in their, in their, in their, in their team, torture them into greatness. Uh, and often times they're so close. Don't give up. They're so close. You know, greatness kind of, it comes all of a sudden one day. You're like, "I got it." Do you know what I'm saying? That feeling that you didn't get it yesterday, and all of a sudden one day, something clicked. You're like, "Oh, I've got it." Could you imagine you gave up that just that moment right before you got it? You know, so I don't want you to give up on that. So I just, just keep torturing you.