There's a scene that played out at Computex in Taipei this week that stopped a lot of people mid-scroll.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia — the company that has become the engine of the artificial intelligence revolution and recently crossed $5 trillion in market value, making it the most valuable technology company on the planet — sat down for a candid interview and said something that most executives would never say out loud. He told the interviewer that he is "always critical of everybody's work" and that "you can't go a day without some criticism."
Read that again. The leader of the world's most valuable tech firm just admitted, on the record, that nobody on his team goes a single day without being told something is wrong.
By almost every rule in the modern management playbook, this should be a disaster. Countless studies, consultants, and leadership coaches will tell you that employees need encouragement, that psychological safety — the feeling that you can speak up without being punished — is the bedrock of high performance, and that criticism, if it must be delivered at all, should be wrapped in praise like a pill inside peanut butter.
Nvidia's results seem entirely unbothered by any of that.
So the question isn't whether Huang's approach works. The numbers make that case for him. The real question — the one worth sitting with — is why it works there, and why the same approach would flatten morale and gut performance in most other organisations within six months.
The answer turns out to reveal something important about the difference between criticism as a weapon and criticism as a gift.
