JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has little patience for distracted employees. Speaking at Fortune's Most Powerful Women summit in fall 2025, he told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell that if an employee appears to be checking email or notifications during a meeting with him, he tells them to close the device. 'It's disrespectful,' Dimon said.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, 64, sees the issue differently — at least when it comes to scale. 'I distinguish between one-to-10-person meetings and very large meetings,' Krishna told CNN in October 2025. 'If it's a very large meeting, I'm sorry. It's not really a meeting. It's a communication vehicle. You're just informing people.'
Krishna draws the line at smaller gatherings, where he expects full attention. 'If it's a small meeting, I would really frown upon if somebody is sitting opposite my desk and lost in their phone,' he said. 'I would tell them: "Why don't you come back when you have time?"'
Dimon's frustration with meeting behavior is not new. In his annual letter to shareholders released in spring 2025, he used the word 'meetings' six times, urging employees to schedule them only when necessary and make them count. 'I see people in meetings all the time who are getting notifications and personal texts or who are reading emails,' Dimon wrote. 'This has to stop. It's disrespectful. It wastes time.'
At a Stanford University appearance in March 2025, Dimon recalled a Zoom call where the divide was stark: 'There were 12 people in the room and four people on the screen and all four people on the screen were on their phone,' he said. 'And people say, and you think you're focusing and learning?'
The stakes behind Dimon's push go beyond manners. JPMorgan has run one of Wall Street's most aggressive return-to-office mandates, requiring most employees in five days a week — a policy tied, at least in part, to protecting the firm's real-estate investment. In late 2025, JPMorgan opened its new $3 billion global headquarters in Manhattan, a 60-story tower with 19 restaurants, a company store and a gym.
Gary Rich, founder of executive coaching firm Rich Leadership, backed Dimon's read on multitasking. 'When people are multitasking during a meeting, the distraction creates a ripple effect — the speaker feels disrespected, other attendees lose motivation, and the meeting becomes less productive,' Rich told Fortune.
What's notable here is what's absent: no regulator, no mandate, no government memo dictating how a meeting should run. Dimon and Krishna are simply exercising the ordinary prerogative of private capital — setting the rules inside companies they built, answerable to shareholders and the market rather than to bureaucrats.
Dimon's stance reflects a $3 billion wager that in-person focus drives productivity worth protecting. Krishna's reflects a technology firm's calculation that flexibility, not uniformity, is its own competitive edge. Both are legitimate answers because both were arrived at by the people who bear the earnings consequences of getting it wrong. That is free enterprise working exactly as it should — no committee required.
