Strategic Thinking & Strategic Action

Fostering strategic thinking and strategic action by organizational leaders since 2007.

Archive
Strategy Lee Crumbaugh Strategy Lee Crumbaugh

Are you the tip of the spear? Nvidia shows the risk

Nvidia just lost the only CEO it has ever had.

Jensen Huang has resigned. The trigger was personal: his admitted affair with a woman U.S. intelligence concluded was spying for China. Then the New York Times reported a second affair, this one with an executive who reported to him, according to five people who work at the company.

The cause was personal. The damage is structural and, most importantly, strategic.

For 33 years, co-founder Huang was the tip of Nvidia’s spear. The company was organized around him.

By his own count, more than 60 people reported directly to him. Sixty. CEOs I work with struggle with ten. I once had 28 direct reports, and that was way too many.

Huang ran the company through group meetings, working problems out in the open with everyone in the room. He said he read several thousand emails a day from people across the company. Asked about traditional org charts, he said “none of that stuff makes any sense to me.”

I’ll give him this: it worked. Information moved fast. Decisions got made close to the work. Nvidia went from a $305 billion company in 2022 to flirting with $6 trillion this year.

But that structure has a cost. When 60 people report to one person, it’s hard to groom someone to be next in line. When all authority runs to one person, so does all the risk.

Read More
Leadership Lee Crumbaugh Leadership Lee Crumbaugh

The Leadership Triangle: Do the work only you can do

In January this year, a team of engineers was camped out in Building 92 on Microsoft's Redmond campus. They were in a race and they were behind. Competing teams at Google, Anthropic, and Meta were moving fast, and Microsoft, despite having taken an early lead in AI, was playing catch-up.

Then their CEO walked in.

He showed up not to deliver a pep talk. Not to review a slide deck. Not to remind them how important their work was. Satya Nadella walked in to show them something he had built.

He opened his laptop and demonstrated an application he called "Chain of Debate,” which is a system for coordinating multiple AI agents working together. He hadn't asked someone to build it for him. He had built it himself, using vibe coding, a method that allows anyone to create working software by describing what they want in plain language and letting an AI tool generate the code. No traditional programming required.¹ (“Anyone” includes me: I am vibe coding our FastTrack™ AI-Enhanced Strategic Planning & Implementation System.)

The room noticed. According to Jacob Andreou, the executive vice president leading Microsoft's Copilot product, the engineers traded the kind of looks that pass between people who suddenly realize the new guy can actually play. "That set the tone for how hard the team was going to push," Andreou recalled. "He was in the room with folks, like over their shoulder, there with his machine out. Watching the boss get such excitement out of building new things inspired the team."¹

Read More