Enterprise leaders are elevating the alarm: conferences have taken over, and actual work is being left behind. And Southwest Airways CEO Bob Jordan is the newest to talk out on the phenomenon—arguing that many leaders mistake fixed conferences for management.
“When you first start, it’s easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership,” Jordan mentioned final week on a panel of CEOs at The New York Occasions DealBook Summit. “…Because what we all find, I’m sure, is there’s no time to ‘work’ and you confuse going to meetings with the work.”
Through the years, Jordan’s answer has been more and more easy: shield his time. For 2026, his purpose is to maintain his calendar fully clear each Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon—blocking anybody from reserving conferences throughout these hours.
Whereas he acknowledges that strategy would possibly sound “crazy” to some executives, he mentioned CEOs are employed to do work solely they will do—and that hardly ever occurs when they’re trapped in back-to-back conferences.
“It’s so that you can work on things you need to work on. You can think about what’s important right now. You can call people you need to talk to,” Jordan added.
The strategy could also be paying off. Regardless of a rocky yr for the airline business, Southwest posted a shock revenue in its most up-to-date quarterly earnings report. Yr-to-date, its inventory worth is up about 23%.
Fortune reached out to Southwest Airways for additional remark.
Conferences have grow to be the bane of existence for workers and employers alike
Jordan isn’t alone in his frustration. Conferences have grow to be a shared ache level for each staff and executives.
Throughout the pandemic, conferences took on an nearly emotional-support function—an tried substitute for in-person interplay amid lockdowns. Without having to attend for a free convention room, calendars rapidly crammed up.
However now, practically 80% of individuals say they’re drowning in so many conferences and calls that they barely have time to get any actual work performed, in keeping with a 2024 Atlassian research which surveyed 5,000 staff throughout 4 continents. About 72% of the time, conferences are deemed ineffective.
That backlash has prompted a rising variety of executives to aggressively prune—or outright remove—conferences from company schedules, generally carving out totally meeting-free days. Nonetheless, some consultants warn that eliminating conferences altogether is a method that might danger eradicating any sense of belonging with the group and backfire in the long run.
“Meetings don’t need to be banished completely; it’s just the ineffective, time-wasting ones that do,” Ben Thompson, CEO and cofounder of Employment Hero, beforehand informed Fortune.
How Nvidia and JPMorgan Chase deal with assembly overload
Different CEOs have adopted their very own unconventional approaches.
Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, as an example, doesn’t have one-on-one conferences together with his greater than 50 direct experiences. Doing so, he has mentioned, wouldn’t solely overwhelm his schedule but additionally sluggish the broader workforce’s capability to deal with challenges, work successfully, and preserve transparency.
“Our company was designed for agility—for information to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know,” Huang mentioned at Stanford College final yr.
At JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon has taken a extra blunt strategy. In his annual letter to shareholders launched final spring, he urged workers to rethink whether or not conferences are value having in any respect.
“Here’s another example of what slows us down: meetings. Kill meetings,” he wrote. “But when they do happen, they have to start on time and end on time – and someone’s got to lead them. There should also be a purpose to every meeting and always a follow-up list.”
Effectivity has grow to be a good greater precedence as JPMorgan has pushed workers again into the workplace 5 days every week. Conferences, Dimon has emphasised, ought to command full consideration.
