If there is one characteristic that signals creativity in business, it might be follow-through. For instance, Nolan Bushnell is only one of the people who could be credited for fathering the video game, but he often gets the credit because he was the first to bring any to market in a big way. He says:

After the creative moment I thought, “Gee, anybody should be able to make a business out of it.” As it turned out, anybody could. I had twenty-seven competitors so fast! (Laughter)

When we asked Nolan Bushnell to tell us about a time when he lost a game in life, he mentioned his having to sell Atari to Warner for twenty-eight million dollars. It was a loss to him, because he couldn’t move his company into retail consumer sales fast enough. But he made the decision with reason and intuition and went on to build other companies. At the time he visited our class, video games and his old company Atari were riding high with billions in sales. But conditions have changed since then, and so has Bushnell. His name now comes up as a backer of successful new technology.

I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. Vision, strategy, marketing, financial management—any management system, in fact—can set you on the right path and can carry you for a while. But no enterprise—whether in business, government, education, health care, or any area of human endeavor—will succeed over the long haul if those elements aren’t part of its DNA.

Of more than a hundred former and current Nvidia employees I spoke with for this book, almost all had a tender story about Huang to relate. One employee—the same one whom Huang had humiliated in front of dozens of people, asking for a full refund of his salary—told me that when he was later diagnosed with a serious medical issue, Huang offered to pay in full, out of pocket, for his treatment. When Ben Garlick decided to leave Nvidia for a start-up, he was startled to receive an impassioned, personal plea from Huang to stay.

In a series of chunk transactions between 2004 and 2006, Priem sold all his Nvidia shares. “That’s why the stock flatlined,” he said. “We basically sold into strength whenever it started going up.” Had he held those shares and done nothing but play cowboy for twenty years, Priem would today be worth more than $100 billion, making him one of the wealthiest people alive—but he told me he didn’t regret his decision. Doing so would have required him to have 99.9 percent of his net worth invested in the volatile stock of a risky tech company he no longer worked for, which didn’t seem like a good idea.

Channeling George Bailey, Priem asked me to consider where his vanished windfall profits had gone. “The shares went out there, but it’s not like they disappeared. It’s in pension plans. It’s in people’s houses. It’s sort of like I contributed $100 billion to our economy,” he said. “I’m on track to give away half a billion in my lifetime, and that has taken most of my time and effort. In the back of my mind, I’m trying to figure out what I would do with a $100 billion foundation, and it is not easy. I wouldn’t even know how to give that away.