Will Jen-Hsun Huang get a chance to survive after falling from the altar? Unless this can be proven

Huida CEO Huang Renxun was involved in an extramarital affair, and the company's image was also affected.

Huida CEO Huang Renxun's extramarital affair involves Chinese espionage scandals. Whether he can survive this crisis has attracted much attention. A well-known scholar at Yale University in the United States said that unless Huang can prove that he was deceived, he may still have a chance to survive, but his fall from the altar has caused an irreparable loss of trust.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, said Huang had previously been "well respected and trusted by everyone in the technology community," but he called the incident "extremely poor judgment." He said that even if Huang is just naive and ignorant, this reckless behavior alone is enough to "cause an irreparable loss of trust."

Sonnenfeld believes that if Huang can prove that he was deceived, he may have a chance to survive by relying on what social psychologists call "idiosyncrasy credits."

The term "character credibility" comes from social psychologist Edwin Hollander, who proposed in a 1958 paper that people can gain autonomy in a group by demonstrating competence and following group rules. Huang has been accumulating this autonomy since co-founding Huida in 1993. But all that goodwill can evaporate once a mistake appears to be motivated by self-interest or touches upon the group's core norms.

The groups listed above include Huida's board of directors, its approximately 42,000 employees who are subject to safety rules, and (from a broader perspective) the U.S. government, which restricts Huida's exports.

Sonnenfeld noted that top corporate executives sometimes return to their old job at another company after experiencing a personal scandal. Former HP CEO Mark Hurd is an example. He led HP to the top of the technology industry in terms of revenue from 2005 to 2010, but was forced to resign after filing false expense reports and concealing a personal relationship with a contractor. About a month later, Oracle hired him. But Huang Renxun's situation is completely different, because Huida is a company he founded.

In addition, as for Huida's successor, it actually does not exist. While companies of Huida's size and importance typically have hierarchies, Huang has tried to keep his management as flat as possible, saying he has only about 60 direct reports. This structure makes it difficult to speculate on who will succeed him.