The inbox as a management instrument
Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens — ranked No. 143 on the Fortune Global 500 and valued at $256 billion — does not write long emails. His replies run to two letters: 'OK' or 'No.' Anything more complex gets dictated as a voice note while he walks the office.
'I try to keep my inbox below 100,' Busch told Business Insider. 'If you have more than 100 emails in your inbox, you lose the overview of what's actually on your plate. I accomplish this by answering messages quickly and using a few words.'
The rule is not personal quirk — it is institutional policy. 'My team is trained to communicate this way,' he said.
No standing meetings, open door
The same logic governs his calendar. Busch, 61, holds no recurring one-on-one meetings with his direct reports. Instead, he keeps his door open and lets executives come to him on demand.
'You come to me whenever you need me,' he said. 'It could be five times a week or once a month. I don't need to entertain people, and they don't need to entertain me.'
The approach strips out the performative layer of corporate management — the status update that exists to signal activity rather than drive decisions.
Physics over MBA
Busch joined Siemens in 1994 and became CEO in 2021 after nearly three decades inside the company. He holds a Ph.D in physics, not an MBA, and his first role at Siemens involved researching energy technologies including fuel cells and high-temperature superconducting transmission lines.
That scientific background, he argues, is the real source of his management discipline. 'As a CEO, you're always making decisions with incomplete and ambiguous information,' Busch told Business Insider. 'Physics taught me how to de-layer a problem, separating the core issues from the less important ones. Once you isolate the core variables, you have a much better chance of making the right decision.'
Since he took the helm, Siemens stock has more than doubled. The company is now the largest in Germany and third-largest in Europe by market capitalization.
A pattern across the top
Busch is not alone. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research summit in 2024 that he does not hold one-on-ones with any of his dozens of direct reports, citing the need for information to 'flow as quickly as possible.' Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan has blocked every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday afternoon on his calendar to preserve time for actual work. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, in his 2024 letter to shareholders, offered a two-word prescription for corporate productivity: 'Kill meetings.'
CEO Times take
The pattern is worth naming plainly: the executives running the largest enterprises in the world are systematically dismantling the bureaucratic calendar that middle management treats as a proxy for leadership. Busch's physics training gave him a framework the business-school curriculum rarely delivers — the habit of isolating variables and cutting noise before acting.
Free enterprise rewards output, not attendance. When the CEO of a $256 billion industrial giant can be reached with a two-letter reply, the lesson for every layer below him is clear: clarity of communication is a competitive asset, and the meeting that could have been an email is a tax on the people doing the actual work.
