Avatar photoSteven Savage

Jensen Huang and the Single Point of Failure

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

No this is not a new indie band. But now that I think of it, that would be a cool name.

So anyway, it seems like current events are my focus, and let’s get to Jensen Huang, his ever-increasing number of affairs, and his departure from NVIDIA. It actually illustrates a larger problem in society, businesses, and project teams. Am I going to relate this to Project Management? Hell yes.

So anyway as of this posting Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, had an affair with a Chinese Spy for awhile, it was less of a secret than you might think, he also turns out to have had an affair with his co-worker. No word from his wife, and hey maybe they have an arrangement, so I don’t know what she’s going through. So as you may guess, Jensen is out and this is a giant shitshow involving mysterious shipments to China, the AI bubble, and more.

I’m not going to explore it. It’s ever-changing. It’s also easily summarized as “really famous Tech CEO turns out to be unwise, compromised, and horny so he’s out.” This was a guy I once heard called one of the least offensive Techbros, and I can’t say if he keeps that title. But he’s an object lesson in many things.

I’d like to focus on why he’s an object lesson for system failure.

So Huang is rich, powerful, and apparently compromised by at least one major nation. His company is the shovel-seller for the AI goldrush. Huang is the classic example of the big CEO, and it turns out he’s a critical point of failure. We don’t know how much damage he’s done, from bad decisions to security risks to more, but we can guess.

In fact, we can guess more. Cheating with a Chinese spy? That makes NVIDIA’s recent financial dealings and valuations even more questionable. What other bad decisions are in there, or just not apparent until we re-assess his behavior.

Jensen is also not alone. Americans seem to be enchanted with the idea of Some Big Daddy who is a super genius that can do everything. I think it’s mostly evolved in the Business world based on commentary I’ve seen, and then leaked into politics. America certainly forgot the lesson of “don’t trust the guy who says he can solve everything.”

The thing is, a lot of attitudes now, especially in business and government are very culty. We want to believe some people are just super-duper mega-brilliant geniuses, often despite evidence to the contrary. This hero worship, this consolidation of power, makes those figures of worship points of failure.

First, the idea that someone is a super-genius renaissance genius capable of leading us all is a joke. No one is an expert in politics, economics, history, medicine, etc. Worshipping such people and empowering them makes them a point of failure – but often they stay at their positions, their office, etc. and keep doing damage.

I’m all for experts. But I want to see results, and a lot of people who WANT to be cult leaders are people who should be given no power whatsoever, ever.

Secondly, even if you had some genius who was a major polymath with social skills, they are still a point of failure. People age. People get insulated due to wealth and fame. People develop drug habits. People get compromised by clever Chinese spies. Even in the fantasy world of some kind of Intellectual Superman, that person is still a point of failure – it just takes once.

Third, this isn’t just politicians and CEOs and kings and religious leaders. This is everything in an organization, formal or informal. People who are the Center of All things will lead others to failure eventually by being, yes, a single point of failure. In a really bad organization you have a hierarchy of people trying to be the Big Name while all making terrible decisions.

You’ve probably been there. Our desires for the Big Leader goes up AND down the corporate ladder and it doesn’t work. We KNOW this.

This is why I’m big on Agile, on networking, on representation, and on limits to power. Organizations need to involve teams and listening and connection. People must be represented as no one knows what everyone goes through. Most of all you need businesses and communities that don’t rely on some central figure so they can adapt and adjust.

Jensen Huang may be a figure of mockery, but he’s really just the latest example of someone who’s a Single Point of Failure. And it’s not that funny when you step back.

(Well it’s still FUNNY, but you know what I mean).

Steven Savage

Election 2026 Analysis

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

OK, so let’s get political. What does a Project and Program Manager think about Election 2026 and structural issues. I know you’re waiting to get to that. OK, maybe not, but trust me, I’ve been thinking about this awhile, and Election 2026 has actually fit my theories and then some.

So we saw a Blue Tsunami. Being upfront about my political preferences for democracy and freedom, I’m thrilled. But I also want to analyze what happened and what it means organizationally. I’ve been watching political changes for sometime, and 2026 is when “a lot of things came together,” where trends became realized – and it’s a change in American politics.

Let’s talk what we saw organizationally. Am I going to be fair? Not really, because I want to be blunt.

The Republican Party is essentially a party of media, and has been evolving that way since Regan (if not earlier). From the Influencer types ranging from seasoned political operators, to conspiracy theorists, to assorted “chuds” it’s grown up around media, showmanship, memes, and marketing. It’s no surprise Trump fit right in, and putting on a show is easier than governing.

Of course the party had to reconcile its conflicting elements – the monied class, religious masses, some outright bigots, and so on. But when you’re good at putting on a show you can do that for awhile. Also they had money and Citizens United and the like helped.

Meanwhile the Democrats have been a coalition party for a long time, to the point there’s jokes about it. They weren’t about unity, which is why I think people like Clinton and Obama, who could speak and build consensus (or at least triangulate) paid off. Democrats don’t have anyone banding them together unless they’re quite remarkable, but that conflict and difference can create a deep bench (note the many current and upcoming stars).

The thing Democrats had (that I think got missed) was networking and real grassroots effort, oft from independent and semi-independent groups. That had been around awhile but got turbocharged during the first Trump administration with groups like Indivisible, etc. But you have decades of organizing and networking and that kept coming together. Trump Administration 2 was even more of a driver to do something, so people rallied to protest and to resist – and that leads to political involvement. There was a lot of local work, and you’ll notice many candidates went very local in the party.

Also after losing to Trump TWICE, I think the Democrats wanted direction, and these networks helped provide direction and energy. Whether party leadership wanted it or not.

So you have widespread, interconnected networks against a top-down system around one guy and his donors/manipulators/sycophants. The people in a top-down system aren’t going to notice the networks as they think in terms of hierarchy. Worse the Republican party’s increasing media focus means they were thinking in memes, reality shows, and pithy statements which doesn’t deliver for people.

Trump knew how to run against a person and turn things into WWE. So did the GOP. But how do you run against a movement with no identifiable faces but a legion of them? I mean they wanted me to care about Hasan Piker and I keep forgetting who he is. I just know he’s got great abs and I have to work out more.

So they got stomped because they literally couldn’t see the opposition. In fact, I think they still can’t, because people seem stunned. What you had was a predictable network effect that you can see in modern times (Hungary, Serbia, etc.) as well as past activities (Civil Rights, etc.). People were pissed, they did something, and they leveraged existing networks and built new ones and that creates widespread organizational power with no one vulnerability that’s hard to assess.

Organizationally, it’s all kind of understandable – it’s similar to Agile methods in many ways. It’s basic organization and response, and it’s not like America hasn’t been surprised by distributed organizations before.. I’d say I’m disappointed in the mainstream media being surprised, but I’m just disappointed with them in general.

But now you’ve got other organizational issues coming up. The Republican Party is losing it’s strongman/figurehead/star one way or another, but their system is built for a Head Daddy Figure (I mean look at how Regan was treated). That means a battle for the position and the bench of candidates out there is not exactly inspiring.

But there’s also a large network of people out there who form a fractious but broad kind of Center-Left coalition that’s pro-democracy. It elected Democrats, but it is MUCH bigger than the idea of a Democratic Party. It also has a lot of people who got active or got more active as they felt actively threatened by the GOP. These people are networked and also will never vote GOP again and assume the party is a potential threat on their own, not because some talking head told them to.

Based on what I saw I expect 2028 to be 2026ish in that Democrats will outperform Republicans. I expect them to have all 3 branches of government and hold or expand their positions in States. How much depends on how elected Democrats respond and listen to the network out there – honestly if you’re lazy at this rate you could just sign off on whatever is popular and probably coast to victory.

As for the Republican Party? I think there’s about to be time in the Wilderness. I’m not sure what happens next because we have parties not just with different philosophies but completely different organizational structures. For the Republican Party to survive it could broaden, split, consolidate, etc. I have no idea at this time.

But I’m going to watch.

Steven Savage

Immune Dysfunction

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

OK back at it after a long amount of not blogging. And let’s talk about the panic over AI and internet security and what gets missed.

Writing this in October of 2026, I’m hearing about all sorts of stories of AI breaching security. Oh and AI made and/or uploaded code that is vulnerable but is downloaded due to complicated dependencies. And the usual stuff about AI and security and it killing us all.

I’m kind of used to it by now. Also not exactly impressed. Congrats, your code told me someone hasn’t updated dependency libraries in three years, thanks AI. I liked you better when you were called Machine Learning and we’re less hyped. Yes, I know the internet is filled with stupid vulnerabilities, I got to see them grow up. I was there at the start.

Here’s the thing when I look at all the internet crises and security vulnerabilities and failures. I recall when the Internet was about failover. It was designed to work around failures and outages and stay connected. But boy we were into that connectivity a lot more.

So everything was about connectivity. More connectivity. Delivering more. Companies jumped onto the internet and looked at all sorts of ways to do more, deliver more – and of course take control of it. Even non-profits or “sort of benevolent non-profit” were all about getting you that information and code as fast as possible forget the rest.

We used to have a lot of computer security because so much was not connected, and there was plenty of human intervention and human paranoia about all this new stuff. We had security by aggressive and unintentional obscurity, plus Ray, the sysadmin, who kept bugging us.

In a way we kind of sort of had an IMMUNE SYSTEM in the old internet and computer age. We just didn’t notice it. We forgot about Ray when he retired.

Then we connected it all together and wondered why things kept going wrong. I think one of the great summaries for me is the Crowdstrike outage. The service and software to protect interconnected computers all over failed and took down chunks of the internet. We were all connected, had all these defenses up, and were so dependent on ONE SERVICE that it created a failure. Think that over for awhile – we defended our connections with another dependency that blew the hell up.

Right now the issues of AI and about every damn other problem of technology is a mix of Late Stage Capitalism and not having an immune system in our technology. We jack everything together to sell Bluetooth Aquariums, then watch it all fall apart because it’s all connected with no defenses (or if there are the defenses go down as one company does 90% of it).

Complain about AI and everything else. What we have though is a lack of a technology immune system in the world. Actually the more annoying parts of AI and the internet in general exist due to this lack of the immune system.

Maybe it’s time we look back a few decades and ask how things ran, why, and what we missed because it was just there.

Steven Savage