The Least Political Room in the World

Jensen Huang runs Nvidia by a rule most executives would find deranged: he holds no one-on-one meetings. Whatever he has to say, he says to everyone at once. If someone tells him a colleague is failing, he copies the colleague on the reply and lets them answer in the same thread. He calls the result the least political large organization you will ever see. The claim is not empty — the mechanism is real, and it works on exactly one kind of politics. To see which kind, put a second room beside his. A junior research analyst is told by his boss to attend a meeting with the executive vice president of a major client. He goes. The EVP looks at him and asks what the hell he is doing there. The analyst does not answer; he turns and looks at his boss. Nothing false was said in that room. No one narrated a lie about an absent colleague. And yet the room was dense with politics — the EVP read the analyst’s mere presence as a status play, the analyst’s silent turn re-assigned authorship of that…