It’s Sunday night. He has his favorite bottle of scotch and is settling into his weekly ritual: reading emails from every employee, each listing their top five priorities — a practice Jensen Huang started in the early days of NVIDIA. For him, this was about getting early signals. It was definitely about control too.
From the outside, some might call that micromanagement. Maybe even a bad practice. I’d call it unconventional.
Bad practices fail. You’ll lose, get fired, or maybe even jail.
Best practices are just common practices with good PR. Safe. Predictable. Average.
Unconventional practices. At first glance, you might even mistake them for bad. But often they’re what we’ll do tomorrow. Ford’s assembly line was unconventional once. Misunderstood until they aren’t.
What we’re really after is extraordinary. More than ordinary. That takes the courage to explore until you find what’s right. Not what everyone else says is right.
Sometimes that means taking an unconventional path. Sometimes it just means executing the basics so brilliantly you beat everyone else.
Extraordinary lives in both places. In the practices no one understands yet, and in the fundamentals no one bothers to master
Take care, friend. Be good.
—Kelly