Nvidia has no org charts. Jensen Huang has 36 direct reports.

Good morning. Thanks for opening Still Monday again. Keep voting, replying and sending it to the manager who has ever reorganized a team by drawing boxes in PowerPoint until everybody felt better.

Today we have a company worth roughly $5.65 trillion that says it does not use org charts.

Its CEO has 36 direct reports.

Somewhere, an HR business partner just closed Excel.

Let’s get to work.

Nvidia is enormous, complicated and operating in one of the fastest-moving industries on Earth. The conventional response would be more structure: more layers, clearer reporting ladders and carefully maintained boxes.

Nvidia has gone in another direction.

HR director Febe Punsalan told Fortune that the company operates with a very flat structure and does not rely on traditional org charts. Its guiding idea is that “the mission is always the boss.” Jensen Huang has said he tries to keep organizational layers low and currently has 36 direct reports. Fortune

That sounds wonderfully simple until you imagine trying it inside a company where nobody knows what the mission is.

Flat organizations are often described as if deleting hierarchy automatically creates speed. It does not. Remove the boxes and something else has to tell people what matters, who decides and where to go when priorities collide.

At Nvidia, the mission appears to do much of that work. Employees are expected to understand the objective and move toward it rather than wait for instructions to travel slowly down a chain of command. People leading strategically important projects can report directly to Huang regardless of where they might sit on a conventional chart.

That system requires unusually strong clarity.

If every team has a different definition of what matters, flat becomes chaos. If nobody knows who can make a decision, fewer layers simply produce more Slack messages. If leadership says “empowerment” but punishes decisions it dislikes, employees quickly rebuild the hierarchy themselves.

Nvidia pairs the structure with something else: unusually low turnover. Fortune reports its global turnover rate at 3.7%, compared with a technology-industry average of 21.9%. In the U.K., 95% of employees surveyed say Nvidia is a great place to work.

Money is part of the story. Employees can buy Nvidia shares at a 15% discount, and the company’s extraordinary stock performance has created significant wealth for some workers.

But the culture is not portrayed as easy. Employees have described intense workloads and a pressure-cooker environment. Punsalan herself says the work is challenging and requires a lot of dedication.

That is what makes the case useful.

Nvidia is not demonstrating that flat organizations are relaxed. It is demonstrating that hierarchy and clarity are not the same thing.

A company can have few layers and extremely clear expectations. Another can have twelve layers and nobody capable of deciding whether the customer gets a refund.

Owners do not necessarily need fewer managers.

They need fewer places where a decision gets lost.

Employees receive two additional companywide “free days” every quarter. Because everyone is off together, people return without the inbox punishment that often follows individual vacation. Fortune

Turns out time off works better when work also takes the day off.

Nvidia says ideas from interns, junior employees and experienced staff can move through its suggestion system, and each suggestion is reviewed and receives a response rather than disappearing into a ticketing abyss.

Radical innovation: answering people.

Strategically important project leaders can report directly to Huang. The structure reduces layers, but authority still exists.

The company did not abolish leadership. It shortened the distance.

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Pick five decisions your team makes repeatedly. For each one, write down who can make it without asking permission, who must be consulted and when the decision needs to move upward.

If you cannot answer those three questions quickly, the problem is not that your org chart needs another box.

Your decision rights are unclear.

Managers can create enormous value. Organizational layers can also add waiting, meetings, reporting and repeated context.

The financial question is not how many managers you employ. It is how much management work each layer eliminates compared with how much coordination it creates.

A layer that resolves complexity earns its cost. A layer that merely forwards complexity has expensive email.

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EMPLOYEE: Who do I report to?

COMPANY: The mission.

EMPLOYEE: Can the mission approve my expense report?

COMPANY: Finance still exists.

EMPLOYEE: So there is an org chart.

COMPANY: Please stop asking hierarchical questions.

Somebody still decides. Somebody still owns the work. Somebody still settles disagreements.

The impressive part of a flat company is not having fewer boxes. It is making the boxes less necessary.

Vote below and tell us whether your company has too many layers, too few, or exactly enough to require another reorganization.

And send this to whoever owns the latest version of the org chart.

We assume it is already outdated.

Technically Wednesday. Emotionally reporting to the mission.

— The Still Monday Desk