A key lesson recommended in the best-seller of the 80s management Looking for excellence advised leaders to “stay with your knitting” and stay “only with the companies you know best”. This insularity may have harmed the adaptation there is a generation and is certainly not the wisdom of the generation of AI. Two weeks ago, Nvidia Founder Jensen Huang revealed at 175 high -level CEO in the industries how he threw his business plans not once but twice to adopt new disruptive advances on the borders of technology, based on the model of her idol, Michael Dell.
And Huang’s idol could not help praising the CEO of Nvidia for his performance leading the organization to the foreground of world affairs. Dell was one of the industry titans who joined us during our 154th CEO for CEO of CEO of Yale Leadership to discuss how they manage strategic innovations while AI continues to evolve quickly.
“Jensen and Nvidia – It is not an understatement – they lead the most important change in progress that occurs all over our world at the moment,” said Dell.
To close the event, Dell, with Dirty CEO Marc Benioff and IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, gave Huang the “Legend in Leadership” prize in recognition of his unrivaled success.
But what often receives less recognition is the source of Huang’s achievements: the ability to adapt and the humility with which he continues to direct, even after all his triumphs. Our interaction with him quickly revealed how a unique leader he is.
Make new beginnings every day priorities
In the 1980s, Intel The co -founder Andy Grove warned that “only paranoids survive”, suggesting key inflection points in strategic decision -making. These days, Huang says that this fluid state of mind is daily and not episodic. Now fight with Microsoft To claim the title of the most precious company in the world by market capitalization, the NVIDIA action has almost increased tenfold since the introduction of Chatgpt in November 2022. 27 billion dollars during the year 2023 to more $ 130 billion During the year 2025, drawn by an unprecedented request for accelerated IT and AI.
Benioff described Huang as someone who predicted that “the future of Nvidia and the future of our industry would be AI”. He added: “No one could see that … it was a vision. It was clarity. It was a goal. [Jensen] is incredible.
Since Huang co -founded Nvidia in 1993, the company worked tirelessly in Pioneer Acceleated Computing. Its first major success occurred when it revolutionized the game industry with the popularization of graphic processing units (GPU) to improve infographic. This laid the foundations for modern AI and led the organization to possibly feed a large part of the world’s factories and infrastructure of AI, industry, technology and aspects of society.
Nvidia was founded with a contrary perspective to “reinvent computers”, as Huang told leaders at the Summit of the CEO. Instead of replacing computers for general use, as many were aimed at doing it at the time, Huang and his co -founders thought it would be wiser to increase it. “It turned out that we were right,” he said. The bet paid, allowing the producer of chips of lead in the GPUs.
Then, more than 15 years later, in 2010, Nvidia pivoted after discovering that her CUDA programming model could be adapted to solve deep learning problems. “The great observation we made was … the approach of in -depth learning was quite generalizable,” continued Huang. “We imagined what would happen if we had to evolve this problem and ultimately imagined what could be done if a supervised learning, where each data element does not have to be marked human, had to be discovered.”
Nvidia and a remignance – once again
He did not stop there. Eight years later, Nvidia has adapted again. The last “big observation” Huang and his team were that “AI really concerns a whole new industry”, as he told us. It was an industry likely to “transform each industry … like electricity … and it is in many ways why I am here”.
By reflecting on his success, Huang shared what led him and Nvidia, where they are today: “We had the courage to break the problem step by step and reinvented everything about our business and everything about the way IT was carried out.”
However, Huang’s most admirable attribute may be his humility. He started his remarks by thanking Benioff, Krishna and Dell for having given his price, calling them “heroes to me”. He has always credited his co -founders and the Nvidia team during his comments. And he closed by again paying a tribute to his three awards, creating them as having “been so decisive in shaping the IT industry that we know today”.
Managers are rarely as successful as Huang has the ability to adapt in a transparent manner, to effectively drive through periods of disruption and to publicly recognize the contributions of other titans of the industry who have taken on importance before them.
By reflecting on the pivot of Huang, Krishna of IBM told CEOs gathered: “swiveling the whole company far from what had done [them] Money for more than 20 years … it has been taking courage beyond vision …[only he had] Courage, grain and brilliance to be able to get there. »»
The success of the CEO of Nvidia suggests that it is time to throw the management mantras of the 1980s. As the philosopher trainer of baseball warned it at the time, “the future is not what it was!”
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the professor of the Crown to Lester in management and president and founder of the Yale Management Weditor of the Leadership Institute. Stephen Henriques is principal researcher at the Yale Managing Director Institute and a former McKinsey & Co.
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