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Who said the art of letter writing was dead? The annual missive to shareholders from Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive and chair, ran to 57 pages plus footnotes.
Described by the Financial Times Lex column as a “masterclass in managing up” to US President Donald Trump, Dimon’s letter saved some of its sharpest criticism not for politicians but poor business communication and management practices.
“Talk like you speak — get rid of the jargon,” wrote Dimon in the tract, which was published this month and also ruminated on tariffs, the global economic outlook, and doing more with less. “Avoid management pablum.”
Dimon’s greatest ire was aimed at meetings. “Kill” them, he wrote. If they happen, make sure they have a hard start and end time, and a clear purpose. Organise them so they are only attended by relevant participants. “Sometimes we think we’re just being nice by inviting people to a meeting who don’t have to be there.”
Calls for meeting culls are generally warmly received. A couple of years ago, Shopify, the e-commerce company, received wide attention for cancelling Wednesday meetings and those with more than two people.
The clamour for the demise of such gatherings has only ratcheted up after the pandemic. “This meeting could have been an email” became a clarion call for white-collar workers whose calendars groaned under the weight of colleagues slyly booking times to get together over Zoom.
According to research by Microsoft between 2020 and 2023, the number of Teams meetings tripled. People complained of inefficient virtual meetings with 55 per cent saying the next steps at the end of a meeting were unclear and 56 per cent that it was hard to summarise what happened.
The result was that employees worked longer days to actually focus on getting their jobs done on top of attending these time-consuming get-togethers.
The insidious meeting creep means Dimon is far from the only business leader to crack down or suggest ways to improve colleagues’ exchange of ideas. When I spoke to companies trying to do four-day weeks, typically the first things to go were meetings.
Perhaps regrettably, other experimenters include masters of tech who see the answer to meeting bloat as — unsurprisingly — yet more tech.
Otter, the transcription service, offers an AI meeting agent that promises to verbally answer questions in meetings, among other things. Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom, predicts a future when employees can go to the beach and send a digital twin to a meeting, maybe even to interact with other avatars. “I can send my digital version — you can send your digital version,” he told The Verge.
Current use of AI to record and produce summaries of meetings already has mixed results. It may save time but it doesn’t pick up on nuance in conversations. That is hardly the worst crime. Recently, I heard of one marketing team discovering too late that their conversation had carried on recording after the client had left the online call. He was less than delighted to receive a transcript listing his various faults.
Dimon has a different focus: attendees should ditch their devices entirely. “I see people in meetings all the time who are getting notifications and personal texts or who are reading emails. This has to stop. It’s disrespectful. It wastes time.”
Some of this bad behaviour stems from the bleak times of the pandemic. Where else could workers squeeze their pips of joy but by “sending texts to each other over what an asshole the other person is”, as Dimon said bluntly in a previous leaked address. It is also about workers dealing with unmanageable volumes of messages over myriad platforms, from email to Slack to WhatsApp.
But Dimon’s intervention is to be welcomed. The last few weeks have seen a steep rise in alarmist conversations about children’s use of smartphones, particularly following Adolescence, a Netflix drama about a 13-year-old boy brainwashed by the manosphere. It is about time someone ticked off adults for their dependency on devices.
I also suspect the problem of inattention is not just about WhatsApp but the boring content and droning participants of meetings themselves.
As Beth Sherman, a communications consultant due to address The Meetings Show (!) later this year, told me: “If the people in your meeting or in your audience are looking at their phones, at best, they’re only half-listening. I’d rather see leaders focused on treating the disease, rather than the symptoms.”
emma.jacobs@ft.com
