What NVIDIA's CEO can teach leaders about killing meetings and sharing problems faster.
Jensen Huang has 60 direct reports. He holds zero one-on-one meetings.
In a recent three-hour conversation with Lex Fridman, the NVIDIA CEO laid out a leadership operating system that looks nothing like what most MBA programmes teach. No cascading org charts. No annual strategy retreats. No hoarding information until the quarterly town hall.
Instead, Huang runs NVIDIA — now valued at over $4 trillion — like a continuous, open reasoning session.
This isn't eccentric behaviour from a tech billionaire. It's a blueprint worth studying.
The case against 1-on-1s
Huang's logic is disarmingly simple. NVIDIA builds systems where networking, cooling, chip architecture, and software all depend on each other. A decision in one domain ripples across every other. So he presents problems to all 60 direct reports simultaneously. The networking expert hears the cooling constraint in real time. The software lead adjusts before anyone writes a brief.
The result: fewer meetings, faster decisions, and no information lost in translation between silos.
Shaping belief systems, not announcing strategies
Most leaders save their big thinking for keynotes and strategy decks. Huang does the opposite. He shares new data, engineering discoveries, and external signals with his team every single day. By the time a major pivot happens — like NVIDIA's bet on deep learning — nobody is surprised. The team has already reasoned their way to the same conclusion.
He calls this "continuously shaping the belief system." It's the difference between dragging people toward a new direction and having them arrive there alongside you.
Breaking fear into pieces
Running a company at NVIDIA's scale comes with extraordinary pressure. Huang's method: decompose anxiety into specific, actionable problems — then immediately hand each piece to the person best equipped to solve it. No sitting with vague dread. No executive stoicism. Just rapid distribution of burden.
This isn't delegation. It's emotional architecture.
What this means for a leadership team
South African businesses love the 1-on-1. It's how most excos operate — the CEO meets each direct report weekly, information flows vertically, and cross-functional alignment happens by accident (if at all). A company like Discovery, managing interconnected products across health, banking, and insurance, could learn from Huang's model. When your business units are deeply coupled, vertical information flow is a bottleneck, not a feature.
You don't need 60 direct reports to try this. Start with one experiment: take a problem you'd normally discuss in three separate 1-on-1s and bring all three people into the same room. Watch what happens when context is shared, not relayed.
Take the Imbila AI Assessment to see where your leadership team stands on AI readiness — and whether your meeting culture is helping or slowing you down.