Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Jim Keller on Leadership”.
Um, okay, so what I was going to bug you with then is I mean Nvidia very publicly. Uh very loudly dropped 10 % of their valuation today and every time right, every time. Something like this happens. Um you get people on both sides going. No, no! It’S real, it’s real to the Moon.
You get people on the other side going. It was a bubble they’re talking whether it’s uh bubble or whether it’s web, 3.0 or they’re, pointing at some of hype bubble um. What is companies are bubbles yeah can can can both of those things be true. Was my question: yeah yeah yeah. That’S like that’s capitalism.
Somebody said, oh, that company’s just kicking the can down the road, and somebody else said duh. That’S how companies work right, get, invest dollars, there’s no stability; okay, there’s, no stability. Okay, then well, there’s a dynamic stability in the sense that there will be always be 100 top companies, but those companies change continuously, like the the myth is.
Oh the you know. The super rich will always be rich. That’S mostly not true. The super big companies will always be big.
That’S not true, like there’s, virtually no companies that are 100 years old that are still viable speaking everybody’s got their day in the Sun, so okay, speaking of which you’re at the helm of a company. Now my understanding is this: is your first time in the CEO position? Is that correct? It is okay, so I was going to ask you with that knowledge right, like uh, one of one of the really famous quotes from someone. I can’t remember who, because I’m terrible at names but um, a really famous quote that I that I read at one point was that good leaders lead a company. Great leaders put the company on a path such that when they leave it becomes better than it was with their leadership.
Um, and you know you just said it right, like there’s very few thinking sure I Okay but well hold on hold on. Let me let me finish the question before you predict my whole thing and answer it so, knowing that 100 years is an awful long time for a single company to stay viable, you know, what does your leadership look like? Is it an in the trenches leadership? Is it a set, the vision and let people do it leadership? How are you find? How are you finding it well yeah I I’d say I like to do both. I I like Visionary leaders um, I worked in you, know, Steve Jobs Apple and I work for Elon and I learned a lot from those guys. They they both.
They are both Visionary leaders but they’re also really Hands-On. People like Steve Jobs, worked on products every day. Now I did, he didn’t work directly with that many people, but I work for a guy, talked to him literally a couple times a day: mik hbert who’s, a brilliant guy guy and it was very Hands-On and very knowledgeable about everything we were doing and you know, And elon’s the same way he’s like he’s a he’s, a Wonder in terms of how many different Technologies and stuff he can say, useful things and have insights about, and he likes everybody to be Hands-On, so yeah, I’m I’m into the Hands-On thing.
So now I I’m a Believer: what’s called cre Collective creativity and I like people to own stuff and feel empowered to go, do it. I played the around the find out video for my whole company on an all hands meeting. Know it’s fun and that’s you know.
So I like people to get stuff done, and you know, but also to own it and it’s okay to screw it up and fail, and as long as you learn something and try it so it’s complicated to be a leader. If you just tell people what to do, they don’t do a very good job. If you just pay attention to Vision, that’s not enough um! You have to be ready to willing to work with people and find people like like good people that work for me.
I have some really good uh Technical and organizational managers and they’re pretty Hands-On people. They know what they’re doing, but they also know how to give people space to go. Do something useful and it’s com.
It’S a combination of things you got to do both okay. Well, tell me what success looks like Brer yeah. Every year we get to build better computers and we we build products, our customers like and uh. We keep going so here’s the funny one.
So when I was a digital we used to joke that would build computers till the money ran out and then the money ran out and we went bankrupt. So I went Tod and I told somebody that joke and they said Jesus the money runs out here. All the time we’ve been bankrupt like three times jry Sanders just you know he goes borrow some money or cuts. A big deal so like like run running out of money was not an AMD problem, and when I went back to AMD, we were like months from bankruptcy and uh, Jensen’s famous for telling everybody they’ll be bankrupt in a month.
You know for most of the company’s life, and so now, like you, you build stuff, Steve Job said you’re only as good as your next product right. I believe that, like people build a great product and they think now we made it not in technology. No, you go make a better product or the the market changes or the customers want something different or or you’ll learn something new or somebody else learned something new that you didn’t know about so yeah success for me is, I want a team, that’s you know, engaged And interesting and we’re building useful stuff and we build stuff that somebody wants and then my expectation is, we have to go build something else like keep going. .