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How do leaders make sure they are hearing the unvarnished truth? How can they cut through the bureaucracy and access unfiltered information? Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, Ben Cohen describes one technique employed by Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. Cohen draws from a new book by Tae Kim (“The Nvidia Way"). Cohen and Kim describe the infamous T5T memos that Huang reads each week.
T5T notes (Top 5 Things) come from employees at all levels of Nvidia. Huang reads them all. They describe issues that they are noticing, concerns they have, or simply exciting and interesting things that they are working on in their areas. He reads them all while sipping a glass of his favorite Scotch on a Sunday evening. Cohen describes Huang's rationale for reading all these emails:
"The documents that make it to a typical CEO tend to get so watered down along the way that they’re liable to leave a puddle on his desk. Huang doesn’t bother with any of them. He doesn’t believe in formal strategic planning or status reports, either. “Status reports are meta-information by the time you get them,” Huang said last year. “They’re barely informative.” He doesn’t want information that has already made its way through layers of management. What he wants is 'information from the edge,' he said last month in a public interview with Laurene Powell Jobs."
In research with Amy Edmondson and Richard Bohmer, we have described how organizations tend to downplay ambiguous risks. Leaders and their teams discount warning signs that are unclear and fraught with incomplete information. As a result, organizations miss opportunities to recover from initial problems and develop solutions. Larger, more serious failures result from the inability to assess ambiguous threats effectively. Huang seems to be purposefully using the T5T memos to identify and amplify these ambiguous risks, and to make sure that the bureaucracy doesn't dampen or paper over important threats.
In Kim's book, Huang explains, “I’m looking to detect the weak signals. It’s easy to pick up the strong signals, but I want to intercept them when they are weak.”
