JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon cautions that a “great” meeting is often a poor one—here is how he prefers to conclude them instead.

(SeaPRwire) –   In the current AI-driven push for efficiency, businesses face pressure to accelerate and demonstrate superiority over rivals. Yet JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon points out that a major barrier to success is surprisingly analog: meetings.

“When you have a meeting, people often don’t know who’s in charge—that’s an error,” Dimon stated this week at a conference hosted by Norges Bank Investment Management in Oslo.

And even with a clear leader, most meetings stumble at the most critical juncture: the conclusion.

“When you have a meeting and someone wraps up by saying ‘That was a great meeting, we’ll pick it up again next week,’ It’s usually a bad meeting,” Dimon remarked. “The meeting should conclude with, Okay David, you’re responsible for X—consult these people.”

For Dimon, a meeting’s value is not judged by its atmosphere but by whether it yields clear accountability and specific action items.

This perspective arrives amid broad dissatisfaction with meetings. A survey of 5,000 employees by software company Atlassian revealed meetings are seen as unproductive 72% of the time. Furthermore, 78% of those surveyed said the sheer number of meetings hinders timely task completion. While platforms like Zoom have simplified gathering, this ease has also accelerated their spread—increasing the need for each to be more effective.

One of Jamie Dimon’s biggest corporate gripes

Meetings have consistently been a sore point for the head of America’s biggest bank.

At last year’s Most Powerful Women Summit, Dimon outlined further stringent rules for meeting conduct and participant etiquette.

“When I attend a meeting, I’ve completed the preparatory materials, and you receive my full focus,” he told the audience.

“No dozing off, no checking my messages,” Dimon continued. “If you have an iPad in front of me and you appear to be reading email or receiving alerts, I instruct you to shut it. It’s disrespectful.”

He emphasized that such concentration is mandatory, adding that the day he cannot maintain that standard will be his cue to retire.

More generally, for meetings that are aimless or subpar, Dimon has proposed a straightforward fix. In his 2024 shareholder letter, he wrote concisely:

“Kill meetings.”

Overall, Dimon’s approach to meetings seems effective. In its first-quarter 2026 earnings report, J.P. Morgan Chase posted revenue of $50.54 billion, exceeding an estimate of $49.17 billion and representing a 10% annual increase.

The backlash against meetings is mounting

Dimon’s irritation is shared. An escalating revolt against excessive meetings is compelling leaders to reconsider their frequency and format.

Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan, for instance, noted it’s common to mistakenly equate meetings with actual productivity.

“Early on, it’s easy to mix up constant activity and meeting attendance with leadership,” Jordan said during a CEO panel at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in December 2025. “…Since we all discover, I’m certain, that there’s no time left for ‘work,’ and you mistake attending meetings for the work itself.”

As a countermeasure, he established a personal goal this year to block off his calendar every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon, creating reserved time for substantive tasks.

Concurrently, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri has implemented a more structured method to reduce meetings within his company. In an internal memo first reported by Business Insider, Mosseri declared all meetings must now have a defined goal, one-on-one meetings will generally occur every two weeks, and staff are advised to reject meetings that intrude on protected “focus time.” The firm also intends to perform audits every six months to monitor meeting volume.