黄仁勋被罢免，Colette Crest出任英伟达临时CEO

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You're listening to Bloomberg [music] Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenc on Bloomberg Radio. Staying on Nvidia, the company's longtime CEO Jensen Huang has been ousted. EVP and CFO Colette Crest has been named interim CEO. Nvidia's board in a statement today said she will continue to serve in those roles, quote, until a permanent successor has been named. The board initiating a search for a permanent CEO and will consider internal and external candidates.

They will indeed. For more on how to make sure a CEO transition is successful, we're joined by Andy West. He's senior partner and global co-leader of strategy and corporate finance over at Mckenzian Company. Also the author of the forthcoming book, Strategy and Value, the four foundations that drive long-term performance. It is out next week. Lucky for us though, we've got an advanced copy, so we want to get into it.

Um Andy, of course, joining us on this Thursday, joining us from Boston. Andy, good to have you here on Bloomberg. Uh we got to ask you about the Nvidia story. It's nothing. It's everything. As one of our colleagues said, my wife who doesn't even talk about what I do, doesn't necessarily care about business news, is like, "Hey, what's up with this dude? Like, you think he's going to be like out or like what's his future?"

Uh he is out. Nvidia, can they pull it off? Shareholders not so confident about a Jensen less Nvidia. So what's on their plate from your perspective?

Well, I mean I would frame the the entire discussion around just CEO transition in general. I mean any CEO transition has a big impact on an organization. In our book, we talk about the unelegatable roles of the CEO and strategy. I mean they set the vision, they set the tempo, they mobilize the organization. founders especially. So you know indie change especially an unplanned one can have a a destabilizing effect.

What about a change where you know a culture is created by an executive uh the executive then has some very public missteps in his personal life and perhaps to some employees like the person they thought they knew didn't end up being the person that they knew. Does what does that do something to a company?

Well, you know, the short answer is of course. I mean, but the key for any of these transitions is to focus on the role you need going forward versus trying to recreate the past. So, you know, you're never going to be able to and nor do you need to create the journey that you've been on. And so, you need to find somebody who can take the strategy forward, which is why strategy is so important in these times of change.

You also need to focus on the organization. I'm glad you're talking about it because I think it is really quite important to quiet the organization. For a mature company that's wellperforming, you know, very few leadership changes in general require immediate or fundamental change in strategy. So if your market has changed, if your ability to compete has changed as a result, of course, you need to be quite precise in thinking about things.

But in in most of these cases, the immediate answer is no. So you know, the board's got to figure out what they're going to do about a transition. But most people should just get back to business and let the transition play itself.

You know, one thing I want to ask you, so the book is Strategy and Value, the four foundations that drive long-term performance. Uh, safe to say that Jensen Wong um created a lot of performance at his company. Uh, also a lot of um investor wealth in terms of the returns in that share price. your team sharing with us that according to research from McKenzie fewer than one in five executives now believe in the quality of their strategy a share that has fallen roughly 40% since 2011 even as the value of great strategy has been rising AI is part of that problem I am curious when you are a CEO so identified with a narrative a trend um when you think about AI and the build and the boom we think about Jensen Wong and they have the numbers to show it in certainly at their company.

But I do think about

CEO when they're so involved with one strategy.

Yeah.

If something starts to change and they see that how hard it is to back off from it.

I'm just kind of playing around here. I have no nothing to base this on, but I'm just saying. I just wonder how

Yeah, there's there's a lot packed in there. So, let me talk about the first thing that you mentioned. I think one we are very much in a strategy moment across the world right now. Every every executive is thinking about strategy. If you just look at something as simple as Google search on what is strategy, it's up 14x right from its 10-year average. So people are asking the question and as you mentioned the value of strategy is more relevant than ever, but the quality of strategy has gone down.

So we're in this strategy moment and yet you know people are not getting what they need out of strategy. Now the problem when you look at it and I think what's affecting everyone everywhere and AI is a big part of that is mobilization. So executives in a lot of ways are addicted to complexity. They're addicted to nuance. You know uncertainty is at an all-time high. When you look at the world uncertainty index that the economist puts out it's four standard deviations above the mean.

And AI is playing a rich role in that. I mean it's creating tremendous opportunity but it's creating a lot of questions. So you know the issue is mobilization. And most organizations are frozen and they need to find a way to actually take advantage of this moment and you know create better strategy and actually get strategy done.

Well, what what causes a like what what are some examples of companies in your view that are not frozen?

Well, I mean I think you'd have to look at companies that are able to actually materially move resources from one place to another to take advantage of the moment. So in the book we talk about the four foundations and I think organizations that are close to these foundations are able to actually have a shared reality about what's happening. They're able to debate their strategy and they're able to act. So things like recognizing a discontinuity in your market and being able to move resources towards that, moving quickly, thinking about sources of competitive advantage and actually am I you know taking advantage of what makes me particularly unique and not just strengths and you know most importantly reallocating resources and you know organizations have a really hard time doing that.

I think in a lot of ways the machine that allocates strategy or that connects strategy and value is not working as well as it should in kind of times of high uncertainty.

Okay. do I do want to go back to the the Nvidia story because this is something that that you know has been the story today. You you've got this this chapter in here about the CEO's unique role in in strategy and value. And if you when you do have a change at the top with somebody as fundamental to an organization as Jensen Wong at Nvidia uh and somebody who has been such an ambassador not just to uh the the investor class but also to the the general world of what he has called a transformative technology.

How does that not change the strategy and value of a company?

Well, think about what strategy and value actually is. I mean, I think the whole book is about deconstructing it and making it actually quite simple, right? Because this complexity is what's keeping people from mobilizing effectively. And if you think about, you know, the removal of any CEO from any organization, does that change the shape of the market? Does that change the applicability of their technology or whatever product that they they sell?

Does that change what makes the organization unique and special? And if the answer is yes, you need to look at that in a pret