This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
I was reading this Business Insider article this week of how Nvidia replaced Intel in the Dow Jones Industraial Average and S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Intel had held that position for 25 years.
It struck me as a sign of the times.
Particularly in how companies are managed.
If you’d told someone this would happen 10 years ago, they’d have laughed in your face.
Intel was the golden child of tech for decades. These were the guys who put “Intel Inside” stickers on pretty much every computer on the planet. They seemed untouchable. Wall Street loved them, and their stock just kept climbing year after year.
But now? Nvidia is worth about $2 trillion while Intel is sitting at around $180 billion. That’s more than a 10x difference. Crazy!
How did Intel lose its way?
Yes they missed the boat on AI. And some other big tech waves.
But the question is why?
The simple answer in my view? They got too “corporate.” And I don’t mean that in a good way.
Intel became this massive bureaucracy where decisions had to go through multiple layers of management. Everything needed a committee. Everything needed consensus. By the time they decided to do something, the market had already moved on.
Their managers got comfortable. They had their nice offices, their nice salaries, and their nice stable careers. Innovation became less about pushing boundaries and more about not rocking the boat.
I’ve seen this movie before. I’ve worked in a couple companies like this. Where people spend more time managing their careers than actually creating value. Where the goal is to climb the corporate ladder rather than build amazing products.
Now Intel is paying the price. And these comfortable managers and employees are paying the price. With round after round of layoffs.
Nvidia on the other hand is managed very ‘un-corporate’
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, runs his company completely differently. He runs it extremely flat.
He, himself, is reported to have 50 direct reports.
When I first heard this, I smiled because it’s exactly what I’ve been preaching with the Beast Method.
No army of middle managers getting in the way of getting shit done. When decisions need to be made, they’re made quickly by the people actually doing the work.
And they focus on hiring absolute beasts – the best engineers they can find. But more importantly, they’ve created a culture where these top performers want to stay. Not because of fancy perks, but because they get to work on hard problems without bureaucratic bs getting in the way.
Is this starting to sound a lot like how Elon Musk manages his companies? Yes, my friend.. you are seeing a pattern.
I think you will continue to see the ‘corporates’ get their butts kicked
This isn’t just about Intel vs Nvidia. This is about a fundamental shift in how companies need to operate to stay competitive.
The traditional corporate model is just too slow, too bureaucratic, and too focused on maintaining the status quo. Meanwhile, companies like Nvidia are running circles around them.
When you have 5 layers of management between the CEO and the people actually building stuff, you’re screwed. You can’t move fast enough. You can’t adapt quickly enough. And your best people will eventually leave because they’re tired of the bullshit.
When I work with people from the corporate world the past few years it feels a bit like when I was watching Mike Tyson fight Jake Paul recently.
The words that come to mind are things like ‘slow’ and ‘old school’.
And it’s not about the age… i was older than most of them. But even working part-time while juggling a bunch of other shit, i could just get a lot more stuff done faster.
Because my systems cut out the fat. All the useless meetings. All the useless updates. All the useless managers in the middle that are playing politics.
They’re a relic of an era that is now dying.
The corporate managers get hit with reality when they get laid off
This is the pattern i’ve seen consistently over the last few years.
A manager from the corporate world finally falls victim to a layoff. And starts hunting for a new job.
Time passes by and they can’t find one.
Then they realize they need to expand their horizons and test their mettle in the startup world or as entrepreneurs. And they are completely unprepared for it.
I’ve had a few friends that wanted to try ‘contracting’ and so I gave them a chance and hired them to help me on some client projects these past few years.
Their mindset coming in tends to be “ok… i’ll get you an update in a week or so.”
And i need to try to re-train their mindset to “i’ll get you several updates today while juggling a few other things you give me.”
This… is how you become a ‘beast’.
Eventually corporates will need to evolve more towards the Beast Method
I’ve been saying this for years – companies need to operate flatter and more nimble.
They need systems that allow for rapid decision making and execution without all the traditional corporate overhead.
The Beast Method, which I’ve been developing and refining for four years now, is basically an extreme version of this evolution where literally everything is a task and all work is an update to a task.
You try to completely axe recurring meetings so that everyone has an open calendar and important ‘impromptu’ topics can be discussed immediately. Because everyone is ‘available’. This way decisions are taken very quickly.
Plus you can have up to 40-50 direct reports and so you retain extremely flat structures.
I don’t expect corporates to jump right to this as it’s too far a leap.
But rather they need to start moving in this direction faster if they want to survive.
The companies that adapt to this way of working will thrive. The ones that don’t? Well, just look at Intel.
Closing thoughts
Right now, the Beast Method is primarily geared towards startups and smaller businesses. It’s easier to implement these practices when you’re starting fresh rather than trying to transform a massive corporation.
But I’m very confident the corporates will have to evolve in this direction. The market is moving too fast, and the old way of doing things just doesn’t cut it anymore.
The smart ones, like Nvidia, are already operating this way. They might not call it the “Beast Method,” but the principles are the same – flat structure, rapid execution, minimal bureaucracy.
This isn’t just some theory. The market cap numbers don’t lie. And neither do the thousands of Intel employees who’ve probably been updating their Linkedin profiles lately.
The future belongs to the companies that can execute fast and efficiently. Everything else is just corporate theatre.
And that show is starting to dwindle 😉
