Two fringe strains of computer science, starved of investment, hated—no, detested—by industry and researchers alike had somehow unified to form a thriving, sprawling entity now careering toward sentience. “I just thought, there is no way that Nvidia is this lucky,” Aarts said. “There’s no way that deep learning just fits this perfectly because Nvidia has never put any effort into it!”

Huang called it “luck, founded by vision.”

For Dally, it was Huang’s tireless work ethic that made Nvidia succeed. Even Dally, who left no spare second in his day, could not quite believe the superhuman efforts of his boss. “The rest of us are just here to reduce the bandwidth demands on Jensen,” Dally said. “I mean, when does he sleep?” Diercks agreed: “His hobbies are work, email, and work.”

Plenty of people worked long hours, though. Jens Horstmann attributed Huang’s success to his adaptability. “I’ve often asked myself, how is it that we started in the same cubicle, you know, with a similar IQ, both working equally hard,” Horstmann said. “How is it that this person not only built this amazing company, but also a network around him of people that—that would just die for him if needed?” Huang, Horstmann believed, had changed himself many times. He recalled Huang at LSI, pushing the simulation software to its outer limits. “Now, he’s still doing the same thing, but what he’s engineering is himself. He was not born as a great CEO; he was not destined to be one. He transformed himself into one, just by abstracting! Just by problem-solving the inputs and outputs of what a good CEO should be.

He solicited input from consultancies, asking, “Tell us how we should organize to go after growth.” One result: “We created a Strategic Growth Office with about fifty people focused purely on refining the strategy and crafting specific initiatives that we could then go pilot.” They did intensive work on market segmentation and identified the core consumers they wanted to target: “high-touch technology fans, who love technology but need some help with it.” That led them to focus intensively on new services they could offer, which included, for example, providing technology and customer support for home health care, building on the success of the Geek Squad service model.

Some of Ferguson’s personal drive came from having “a problem-solving mindset, so chomping down on a really intriguing problem is for me what the job’s all about.” This was a constant theme in our research and interviews with the highest-performing CEOs. Ferguson, using the analogy of being the architect of a building, was also energized by the challenge of championing his own strategy. “It was very exciting because it is a vision, and I will take all the time necessary to go from rough sketch to blueprint, to bringing in the team, the subcontractors, to actually seeing the building. There’s nothing like it, it’s so very rewarding.” Ferguson also shared that he is comfortable with a “gradually making progress mindset.” “The key to my success,” he shared, “is my ability to keep at it every day.” Sustaining his energy through the long haul of these years also was an appreciation for small wins. “There are small wins even in big marathons. You chunk up these big, long, journeys into steps. Sometimes it’s just a board meeting in which you finally got someone to agree.”

Creating awareness of small wins, and celebrating them, was also key to sustaining his team’s energy after initially exciting them with the vision. “First, they needed the belief that the goal was worth the journey. Why does it matter? Then it was celebrating the small victories. So getting the document ready, finishing the analysis, getting the vote, all those steps.” For the company as a whole, “there were some metrics that we could share about in every town hall, having to do with asset flows, client wins, and our win-loss ratio.

Travis found a number of additional ways to regularly tap into the perspective of those outside the firm. He would appear at Q&A sessions with MBA students, which gave him access to the views and attitudes of younger people. In addition, twice a year he attended CEO Summits held by Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. These are vigorous debate events in which leaders across industries and from around the globe, as well as government figures, research analysts, and journalists, are challenged to engage in wide-ranging discussions of topics, from global political issues, such as competition with China, to leadership style. Attendees are often put on the hot seat, for example, to defend a statement they made in the press. Travis recalled that one summit he was pitted against an investor who had very publicly shorted Dunkin’ stock and whom Travis had strongly rebuked in a press interview. As he wryly commented about the encounter, the sessions ensure that “you can't fall asleep.”

The single most helpful source of outside perspective Travis found was gained by joining the boards of other companies. “If you asked me about the one thing I’ve done in my career that really helped my development as a CEO,” he told us, “it was sitting on another board. Every time I got to a board meeting, I write down more about the company I’m running than I do about that company.” Acknowledging that many CEOs say they don’t have time to serve on another board, he stresses that not only does it help to see how other companies operate but also the other company has “got a plethora of experiments going on that you can utilize for your company.

For acquisition, he shared, “We would look at almost anything that came up within the industry for sale, and we had four factors that drove our decisions. One, we would only buy number one or two share brands in their category. We did not believe we could take a dying brand and turn it around. Two, we wanted to buy businesses that had higher gross margin than out company average, so would help our gross margin. Three, we looked for asset-light companies. We didn’t want to buy a company with lots of factories or ones for which we’d have to build new factories. We preferred to bring operations into our own facilities. And four, we went for products that had some sort of advantage versus the competition that we could leverage with our marketing, sales, and operations muscle to make better.” That formula guided the well-measured acquisition of numerous leading brands during his tenure, including Spinbrush, OxiClean, Orajel, Batiste, and Vitafusion. These were businesses that his own business leaders had the expertise to run, and he folded them into Church & Dwight’s existing operations. Focusing on employees with R&D expertise, they kept, on average, only 10 percent of employees, many of whom joined the team at headquarters. “We doubled the size of the company,” he reported, without adding substantially to the number of employees.