In today’s AI-fueled race for efficiency, companies are under pressure to move faster—and prove they can outperform their competitors. But according to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, one of the biggest obstacles to success remains surprisingly low-tech: meetings.
“When you have a meeting, people often don’t know who’s running it—that’s a mistake,” Dimon said at Norges Bank Investment Management’s conference in Oslo this week.
And even when leadership is clearly defined, most meetings fail at the moment that matters most: the ending.
“When you have a meeting and someone ends the meeting by saying ‘That was a great meeting, we’ll pick it up again next week,’ It’s usually a bad meeting,” Dimon said. “The meeting should end with, Okay David, you’re going to do X—talk to these people.”
For Dimon, a meeting’s success isn’t measured by how it feels—it’s measured by whether it produces clear ownership and concrete next steps.
It comes at a time when there’s widespread disdain for meetings. A survey of 5,000 workers by software firm Atlassian found that meetings are considered ineffective 72% of the time. Even more, 78% of respondents said the volume of meetings makes it difficult to complete their work on time. And while platforms like Zoom have made it easier than ever to convene, that convenience has also fueled meeting proliferation—raising the stakes for making each one more efficient.
One of Jamie Dimon’s biggest corporate gripes
Meetings have long been a sticking point for the leader of the U.S’s largest bank.
At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit last year, Dimon laid out additional strict expectations for how meetings should run—and how participants should behave.
“When I go to a meeting, I’ve done the pre-reads, and you get 100% of my attention,” he told Fortune.
“None of this nodding off, none of this reading my mail,” Dimon added. “If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you’re reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing. It’s disrespectful.”
Focus, the 70-year-old said, is non-negotiable, and the day he can no longer give that level of attention will be his signal to step aside.
More broadly, if meetings lack a clear purpose or fail to meet basic standards, Dimon has offered a blunt solution. In his 2024 letter to shareholders, he wrote simply:
“Kill meetings.”
And overall, Dimon’s meeting strategy appears to be working. In its Q1 2026 financial results, J.P. Morgan Chase reported revenue of $50.54 billion, up from a $49.17 billion estimate and up 10% year-over-year.
The backlash against meetings is mounting
Dimon isn’t alone in his frustration. A growing backlash against meeting overload is pushing executives to rethink how—and how often—meetings should happen.
Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan, for example, has said it’s easy to fall into the trap that meetings are work.
“When you first start, it’s easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership,” Jordan said on a panel of CEOs at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in December 2025. “…Because what we all find, I’m sure, is there’s no time to ‘work,’ and you confuse going to meetings with the work.”
As a remedy, he set a goal for himself this year to keep his calendar clear every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon, so he could have dedicated time to get things done.
Meanwhile, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has taken a more systematic approach to curbing meetings across his social media company. In a staff memo first reported by Business Insider, Mosseri said every meeting must now have a clear objective, one-on-ones default to a biweekly cadence, and employees are encouraged to decline meetings that cut into dedicated “focus blocks.” The company also plans to conduct twice-yearly audits to keep its meeting load in check.
