JPMorgan CEO adopts this simple measure to prevent meetings from being a waste of time

In today’s race for AI-driven 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 something surprisingly low-tech: meetings.

“When you have a meeting, people often don’t know who is leading it — and that’s a mistake,” said Dimon during the Norges Bank Investment Management conference in Oslo (Norway).

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And, even when leadership is clearly defined, most meetings fail at the most important moment: closing.

“When someone ends a meeting by saying, ‘That was a great meeting, we’ll pick it up 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, the success of a meeting is not measured by the feeling it leaves, but by the ability to generate clear responsibilities and concrete next steps.

This happens at a time of strong rejection of meetings. A survey of 5,000 workers carried out by the software company Atlassian showed that meetings are considered ineffective 72% of the time.

Additionally, 78% of respondents said the volume of meetings makes it difficult to complete work on time. And while platforms like Zoom have made it easier than ever to bring people together, that convenience has also fueled the proliferation of meetings — increasing the pressure to make each one more efficient.

One of Jamie Dimon’s biggest corporate pet peeves

Meetings have long been a sore point for the leader of the largest bank in the United States.

At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit last year, Dimon laid out additional strict expectations for how meetings should work — and how participants should behave.

“When I go to a meeting, I have read all the material in advance and give it 100% of my attention,” he told Fortune.

“No napping, no reading emails,” Dimon added. “If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you’re reading email or receiving notifications, I’ll tell you to close the damn device. That’s disrespectful.”

Concentration, according to the 70-year-old executive, is something non-negotiable, and the day he is no longer able to offer this level of attention will be the sign that he should leave his position.

More broadly, if meetings don’t have a clear purpose or don’t meet basic standards, Dimon has already laid out a straightforward solution. In his 2024 shareholder letter, he wrote simply:

“Stop the meetings.”

And overall, Dimon’s meeting strategy appears to be working. In its financial results for the first quarter of 2026, JPMorgan Chase reported revenue of US$50.54 billion, above the estimate of US$49.17 billion and up 10% from the same period a year ago.

Backlash against meetings is growing

Dimon is not alone in this frustration. The growing backlash against too many meetings is leading executives to rethink how — and how often — they should happen.

Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan, for example, said it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking meetings are work.

“When you first start out, it’s easy to confuse rushing and attending meetings with leadership,” Jordan told a panel of CEOs at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in December 2025. “Because what we’ve all realized, I’m sure, is that there’s no time left to actually work, and you end up confusing meetings with work.”

As a solution, he set a goal for himself to keep his schedule clear on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons this year so he has time dedicated to actually completing tasks.

Meanwhile, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has taken a more systematic approach to reducing meetings at his social media company.

In an internal memo first reported by Business Insider, Mosseri stated that every meeting now needs to have a clear objective. Individual meetings now occur, by default, every two weeks, and employees are encouraged to refuse meetings that invade periods reserved for concentration.

The company also plans to conduct biannual audits to keep its meeting load under control.