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Who said that the art of writing was dead? The annual letter for the shareholders of Jamie Dimon, executive director and president of JPMorgan, was made to 57 pages more footnotes.
Described by the Lex Financial Times column as a “Masterclass in management” For the president of the United States, Donald Trump, Dimon’s letter saved some of his most clear criticisms not for politicians, but bad communication and business management practices.
“Speak like you, talk: I relieved the jargon,” Dimon in the tract wrote, which was published this month and also reflected on rates, global economic perspectives and doing more with less. “Avoid the management of Pablum.”
Dimon’s greatest anger was aimed at meetings. “Kill them,” he wrote. If they happen, be sure to have a hard start and end time, and a clear purpose. Organize them so that the relevant participants only attend. “Sometimes we believe we are being friendly to invite people to a meeting that doesn’t have to be there.”
Calls for the sacrifices of the meeting are usually received hot. A couple of years ago, Shopify, the electronic commerce company received great attention to Cancel Wednesday meetings and those with more than two people.
The clamor for the disappearance of such meetings has only increased after the pandemic. “This meeting could have been an email” became a claron call for white collar workers whose calendars groaned under the weight of colleagues who reserved reserve times to meet on Zoom.
According to Microsoft’s investigation between 2020 and 2023, the number of team meetings tripled. People complained about inefficient virtual meetings with 55 percent who said that the next steps at the end of a meeting were not clear and 56 percent was difficult to summarize what happened.
The result was that employees worked longer days to really concentrate on doing their jobs in addition to attending these meetings that take a long time.
The insidious meeting of the meeting means that Dimon is far from being the only Business leader To take energetic measures or suggest ways to improve the exchange of colleagues’ ideas. When I talked to companies that tried to make weeks of four days, generally the first thing to go were meetings.
Perhaps unfortunately, other experimenters include Masters of Tech who see the answer to know the swelling as, as expected, even more technology.
Otter, the transcription service offers an AI meeting agent that promises to 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, perhaps even to interact with other avatars. “I can send my digital version, you can send your digital version,” he said The edge.
The current use of AI to register and produce summaries of meetings already has mixed results. It can save time, but does not retire from nuances in conversations. That is not the worst crime. Recently, I heard that a marketing team discovered too late that his conversation had continued recording after the client had left the call online. He was less delighted to receive a transcription that lists its various failures.
Dimon has a different approach: attendees must get rid of their devices completely. “I see people in meetings all the time they receive notifications and personal texts or who are reading emails. This has to stop. It is disrespectful. Prepare time.”
Part of this bad behavior comes from the gloomy times of the pandemic. Where else the workers could squeeze their pips for joy, but “sending text messages about what the other person is a moron,” as Dimon said without surroundings in an anterior leaked direction. These are also workers who deal with unmanageable volumes of messages about innumerable platforms, from email to Slack and WhatsApp.
But Dimon’s intervention must be welcome. The last weeks have seen a strong increase in alarmist conversations about the use of smartphones in children, particularly in a row AdolescenceA Netflix drama about a 13 -year -old child brain washing through the free. It is time for someone to have marked adults for their dependence on devices.
I also suspect that the problem of lack of attention is not just about WhatsApp, but about boring content and meetings participants in meetings.
As Beth Sherman, a communications consultant who must address the meetings program (!) Later this year, he told me: “If people at their meeting or at their audience are looking at their phones, in the best case, they are only halfway. I prefer to see the leaders focused on treating the disease, instead of symptoms.”