Nvidia's interim chief executive, Colette Kress, inherits a company built on a radical scheduling rule: founder Jensen Huang ran 60 direct reports without holding a single one-on-one meeting. Now the question for practitioners is whether that doctrine survives his resignation.

Huang explained the policy at Stanford University, where he laid out the operating logic behind it. "I don't do one-on-ones with any of them," he said.

His argument was structural, not personal convenience. Frequent catch-ups, he said, cluttered his calendar and, more importantly, blocked the wider team from solving problems, working effectively and staying transparent. The comparison he drew was deliberate: information at Nvidia should move like the company's products—fast and unobstructed.

What did the no-one-on-one rule actually change?

Huang designed the practice around information symmetry. Nothing he told one executive stayed private from the rest.

"They never hear me say something to them, that is only for them to know," he said. "There's not one piece of information that I somehow secretly tell the staff; I don't tell the rest of the company."

He framed the payoff in terms of speed and empowerment. "In that way, our company was designed for agility. For information to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know," he said.

The rule did not isolate him from his team. Huang said he still caught up with executives regularly—they simply did not book diary time to stay aligned.

Formal reviews went the same way. "I write no reviews for any of them," he said. "I give them constant reviews and they provide the same to me."

And when an employee genuinely needed him, Huang said he would "drop everything for them." The system removed routine meetings, not access.

Who is Colette Kress and what does she signal?

Kress stepped up as interim CEO after Huang's resignation. Forbes estimates her net worth at $1.2 billion. She holds a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.

Her career spans nearly three decades in finance across Texas Instruments, Cisco and Microsoft. She joined Nvidia in September 2013 as CFO.

Since then she has steered the company's finances through its defining transformation—from a business largely focused on video game hardware to a chipmaking powerhouse at the center of the AI boom. Nvidia's market cap climbed from roughly $9 billion to a peak of $5 trillion under her financial watch. It has since dropped below $4 trillion following the news about Huang.

Kress, 59, has not said whether she will drop one-on-ones as well. But after 13 years as Huang's right hand on the finances, she speaks his language on efficiency.

"We do not waste a day, we don't waste a dime," Kress said in 2024. "And those two things are really important about us, our agility to move fast, but our ability to not waste things along the way."

How widespread is the war on meetings?

Huang sits firmly in a broader camp of executives who treat routine meetings as dead weight.

Alexander Lacik, former CEO of Pandora, told Fortune that too many meetings give every departmental issue "equal attention" regardless of merit. "There's only one, two, three activities that actually draw disproportionate value and the rest is just background noise," he said. He limited his catch-ups with management and, nearing the end of his career, said he focuses on inserting himself "where I make a high impact."

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby caps his meetings at four hours a day and wants the ones he keeps to be "quick" and "almost all conversational."

Shopify went further in 2023, axing all meetings involving more than two people in a company-wide "calendar purge" intended to free employees for other work.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a self-described fan of "messy meetings," mandates a strict protocol to make them useful: a six-page memo replaces PowerPoint—slides are too vague—and the first half hour of each meeting is spent reading it in silence together, setting up what he calls "a really elevated discussion."

For Nvidia watchers, the pattern matters beyond etiquette. The no-one-on-one rule encoded how information moved through a $4 trillion company. Whether Kress keeps it will signal how much of Huang's operating system survives the transition.