Why Top CEOs Are Ditching Recurring Meetings And Polished Emails (And It’s Not What You Think)
(SeaPRwire) –
By: Logan Pierce
Most corporate leadership content frames minimalist work habits as a fancy new trend for influencers. It sells productivity courses and expensive planners to overstretched middle managers who can’t actually change their company’s culture. What most outlets miss with Roland Busch’s viral habits is that this isn’t a self-care trick. It’s a fundamental restructuring of how authority and accountability work inside a $256 billion global industrial giant.
Busch became Siemens CEO in 2021. He joined the firm back in 1994, and worked his way up over 27 years. He holds a PhD in physics, not a traditional MBA from a top business school. He started his Siemens career researching energy technologies, including fuel cells and offshore wind. Since he took the top job, Siemens stock has more than doubled. The firm is now Germany’s largest public company, and third largest in Europe by market cap.
Busch keeps his email inbox below 100 messages at all times. He answers most messages with two words, usually “OK” or “No”. He has no recurring one-on-one meetings with his direct reports. He keeps his door open, and tells executives to come to him only when they need something. He says he doesn’t need to entertain people, and they don’t need to entertain him. He is far from the only top CEO pushing back against bloated meeting schedules.
Most people look at this trend and think it’s just about cutting wasted time. That’s a surface level take. The core shift here is moving accountability from process to outcomes. Traditional recurring meetings force people to show up with updates, even when nothing needs discussing. They turn attendance and polished small talk into a proxy for good performance. This punishes people who get work done instead of performing for their boss in front of the team.
Other top leaders have already walked this path. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang cut all one-on-one meetings with his direct reports to speed up information flow and improve transparency. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon bluntly told companies to kill bad meetings that drag down productivity. Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan clears three afternoons a week just to do actual work, instead of sitting back-to-back in meetings. All of these moves push responsibility down to individual leaders, instead of hoarding it at the top.
Any large company that refuses to move past process-based accountability will lose its best people to more agile competitors within a decade.
Author bio: Logan Pierce, independent business researcher covering corporate governance and global industrial leadership trends.