Top 5 Things
You probably have heard of NVIDIA. The biggest company in the world by a market cap. It is $4.38T as of today. Top 5 things(T5T) is apparently the way their CEO Jensen handles his direct reports as well as others. He seems to want his company to be a flat organization that everyone has agency. Given my thirst for this exact thing being the heart of our company, I decided to adopt it. We are already doing something similar to it. I particularly like the "action word" usage to avoid fluff.
According to NVIDIA way, T5T are written in the following format:
- Five bullet points.
- Start each bullet with an action word, such as finalize, build, or secure.
- Tag the email subject by topic or department so Jensen can search for information across NVIDIA.
- Include both work underway and firsthand observations—customer problems, competitors, technology developments, and potential delays.
- Send the email to the relevant team and leadership distribution lists.
As mentioned earlier, the action word part I think is extremely important. What it means I think is to use the verb that clearly describes what I can see when it is done. For example, finalize means you have a final version of something that I can see. Build means you build something I can see. Secure means I see something that you secure.
The opposite would be words like 'plan', 'continue', 'improve', and so on. It doesn't describe things that I will see when you do those things. You can instead create a plan, finish x, y, and z part of the project, finish fixing the errors surfaced by the yesterday's analysis.
This approach made me more disciplined evaluating how each person is doing during the standup today. I'll re-evaluate this system in a month and report back here.