The Operating System
06 Candor Principle

Kill the Information Monopoly

Power at Nvidia isn't supposed to come from knowing things others don't, so information goes to everyone at once.

I don't believe in a culture, in an environment where the information that you possess is the reason why you have power.

In his Stanford GSB “View From The Top” conversation (March 2024; GSB published its write-up in April), Huang described a company designed against information hoarding: “I’m very transparent with people.” And on why: “Oftentimes, the information is hard to hear, and the situations are complicated, but I trust that you can handle it.”

The job as he defines it. “What my job is is very simply to create the conditions by which you can do your life’s work.”

The mechanism. Our reading, drawing on his Stripe Sessions conversation with Patrick Collison: few layers, direction given to many people at once, and no habit of relaying “Jensen wants…” through a chain of managers. The plays below that sit under this principle cover the span of control, public feedback, the Top 5 emails, and reasoning in words.

Doesn’t transfer to every room. Radical openness assumes people can handle hard information and won’t weaponize it, and in regulated or listed businesses some things legally can’t go to everyone. It also works best when the boss is the most technical person in the room; in most companies, flattening the information without the expertise just spreads confusion faster.

In detail

  1. 07 Sixty Direct Reports, No One-on-Ones Huang runs one of the widest spans of control in business and refuses private one-on-ones, so nobody gets a version of the truth the rest don't.
  2. 08 Give Feedback in Front of the Room Huang corrects people in public on the theory that one person's mistake is everyone's lesson.
  3. 09 Read the Top Five Things, Skip the Status Meeting Instead of status reports, staff send short notes on their top five priorities and observations, and the CEO reads a large sample of them himself.
  4. 10 Reason Out Loud, in Words Huang trusts a written argument over a spreadsheet, because reasoning can be checked and numbers can be made to say anything.

Across the chapters