The four-day unraveling
On Sunday, the most celebrated CEO in technology sent his employees a memo admitting he had been unfaithful to his wife. "There is no excuse for what I did," he wrote. By Wednesday night, his board was meeting to decide his fate. By Thursday, Jensen Huang - the leather-jacketed founder who ran Nvidia for 33 years and was once ranked by Harvard Business Review as the world's best-performing CEO - had resigned as president, chief executive, and board member, effective immediately.
The woman at the center of it, US intelligence agencies suspect, was gathering information for Beijing. No charges have been reported, and the board said it had no reason to believe company secrets were compromised. It did not matter. A second relationship, reported by The New York Times days later - this one with a subordinate - finished what the first began. Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos: the lineage is long, and the law never changes. The arena changes; the fork does not.
Five lessons before your next campaign
First: the brand must outlive its hero. For three decades, Nvidia's brand and its founder's silhouette were the same image. Healthcare does this constantly - the hospital that is really one star surgeon with a building around him.
