Nvidia's Meeting Discipline: Huang Banned One-on-Ones, Kress Bans Waste

Sixty direct reports, zero one-on-ones. That was the rule Jensen Huang ran at Nvidia for years, and the question now hanging over the chipmaker is whether interim CEO Colette Kress keeps it after his resignation.

Huang laid out his logic at Stanford University, speaking at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. "I don't do one-on-ones with any of them," he said of his dozens of direct reports.

The former CEO and cofounder argued that frequent catch-ups would clutter his calendar and, more importantly, block the wider team from solving problems, working effectively and staying transparent.

What did Huang's no-one-on-one policy actually mean?

"They never hear me say something to them, that is only for them to know," Huang said. "There's not one piece of information that I somehow secretly tell the staff; I don't tell the rest of the company."

The design goal was speed. "In that way, our company was designed for agility. For information to be to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know," he added.

The rule did not make him unreachable. Huang said he still caught up regularly with executives, just without diarized check-ins. "I write no reviews for any of them," he said. "I give them constant reviews and they provide the same to me." When an employee truly needed his time, he said he would "drop everything for them."

The takeaway: at Nvidia, open information replaced private meetings.

Who is Colette Kress, and will she keep the rule?

Kress stepped up as interim CEO following Huang's resignation. Forbes estimates her net worth at $1.2 billion. She holds a finance degree from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.

She spent nearly three decades in finance roles at Texas Instruments, Cisco and Microsoft before joining Nvidia in September 2013. Over 13 years as CFO she steered the company from a video-game hardware business into a chipmaking giant at the center of the AI boom. Market capitalization climbed from roughly $9 billion to a $5 trillion peak, before slipping below $4 trillion on news of Huang's exit.

Kress, 59, has not said whether she will drop one-on-ones too. But her own mantra tracks closely with Huang's. "We do not waste a day, we don't waste a dime," she said in 2024. "And those two things are really important about us, our agility to move fast, but our ability to not waste things along the way."

What do other leaders say about meetings?

Huang is far from alone in treating meetings as a cost.

• Alexander Lacik, former Pandora CEO, told Fortune that too many meetings give every issue "equal attention." "There's only one, two, three activities that actually draw disproportionate value and the rest is just background noise," he said. He limited catch-ups with management.
• Scott Kirby, United Airlines CEO, caps his meetings at four hours a day and wants them "quick" and "almost all conversational."
• Shopify went furthest, axing all meetings involving more than two people in 2023 in a company-wide "calendar purge" to free employee time.
• Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, mandates a six-page memo instead of PowerPoint because slides are too vague, with the first half hour spent reading it in silence before what he calls "a really elevated discussion."

The pattern is consistent: leaders who treat attention as a scarce resource structure their calendars around it.