SANTA CLARA, California. Succession planning, as practiced by the dominant local primate, is the ceremony by which a corporate troop selects its next chief executive, or "CEO," while reassuring the incumbent that he is permanent. This week the ceremony reached Nvidia, the Santa Clara firm whose silicon performs the calculations behind the species' artificial intelligence. Reuters reports that internal discussion favors two candidates to eventually replace co-founder Jensen Huang: the company's top engineer and its chief financial officer.
Note which candidacy the species classifies as the risky one. Not the dependency on a single product line built by a single man's discipline — that is infrastructure. The risk is the engineer herself, whose candidacy must survive a deliberation, a risk assessment (Form SC-9, Candidate Nontraditional), and a bench of alternates should the experiment of letting the builder near the building produce results. The chief financial officer, fluent in margins, is the prudent choice; that the margins arrive exclusively through the engineer's silicon is filed under weather. A mechanism called the board oversees the transition. Its stated test is merit. Its operating test is familiarity: the board selects whoever it has already met. "Engineers tend to focus on the product," one succession adviser told this desk. "Building things is a phase. One grows into spreadsheets."
The itemized bill, then:
CFO's command of margins: priced at par.
Founder-continuity premium: substantial, compounding.
One functioning grasp of the only object generating revenue: entered as intangible, pending valuation, pending committee, pending the scheduled conclusion of the deliberation, fiscal year open.
The absurdity hides under "leadership fit," a line item with no fixed amount and no floor.
This correspondent attempted to price the engineer's silicon expertise directly and the instrument returned $0.00, rounded down. The expertise continues to function regardless. Value on Terra begins existing the moment it is invoiced, and not one moment sooner.
Which leaves the ceremony unable to name what is actually being succeeded. If competence disqualifies a candidate, the office in question is not the job. It is the seat. The succession plan will do its one duty flawlessly — reassure the incumbent he is permanent — and the incumbent, having heard nothing to the contrary since 1993, will agree. The ledger balances. Nothing on Terra is permanent, this desk finds, except the man currently being succeeded.
