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Business leaders are raising the alarm: Meetings have taken over, and real work is being left behind. And Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan is the latest to speak out on the phenomenon—arguing that many leaders mistake constant meetings for leadership.

“When you first start, it’s easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership,” Jordan said on a panel of CEOs at the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2025. “…Because what we all find, I’m sure, is there’s no time to ‘work,’ and you confuse going to meetings with the work.”

Over the years, Jordan’s solution has been increasingly straightforward: Protect his time. For 2026, his goal is to keep his calendar completely clear every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon—blocking anyone from booking meetings during those hours.

While he acknowledges that approach might sound “crazy” to some executives, he said CEOs are hired to do work only they can do—and that rarely happens when they are trapped in back-to-back meetings. 

“It’s so that you can work on things you need to work on. You can think about what’s important right now. You can call people you need to talk to,” Jordan added.

The approach may be paying off. Despite a rocky 2025 for the airline industry, Southwest posted a surprise profit in its October 2025 quarterly earnings report. Year over year, its stock price is up about 16.5%.

Fortune reached out to Southwest Airlines for further comment.

Meetings have become the bane of existence for employees and employers alike

Jordan isn’t alone in his frustration. Meetings have become a shared pain point for both workers and executives.

During the pandemic, meetings took on an almost emotional-support role—an attempted substitute for in-person interaction amid lockdowns. With no need to wait for a free conference room, calendars quickly filled up.

But now, nearly 80% of people say they’re drowning in so many meetings and calls that they barely have time to get any real work done, according to a 2024 Atlassian study that surveyed 5,000 workers across four continents. About 72% of the time, meetings are deemed ineffective.

That backlash has prompted a growing number of executives to aggressively prune—or outright eliminate—meetings from corporate schedules, sometimes carving out entirely meeting-free days. Still, some experts warn that getting rid of meetings altogether is a strategy that could risk removing any sense of belonging with the organization and backfire in the long term.

“Meetings don’t need to be banished completely. It’s just the ineffective, time-wasting ones that do,” Ben Thompson, CEO and cofounder of Employment Hero, previously told Fortune.

How Nvidia and JPMorgan Chase tackle meeting overload

Other CEOs have adopted their own unconventional approaches.

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, for instance, does not have one-on-one meetings with his more than 50 direct reports. Doing so, he has said, would not only overwhelm his schedule but also slow the broader team’s capacity to address challenges, work effectively, and maintain transparency.

“Our company was designed for agility—for information to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know,” Huang said at Stanford University last year.

At JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon has taken a more blunt approach. In his 2025 annual letter to shareholders, he urged employees to rethink whether meetings are worth having at all.

“Here’s another example of what slows us down: meetings. Kill meetings,” he wrote. “But when they do happen, they have to start on time and end on time—and someone’s got to lead them. There should also be a purpose to every meeting and always a follow-up list.”

Efficiency has become an even higher priority as JPMorgan has pushed employees back into the office five days a week. Meetings, Dimon has emphasized, should command full attention.

“None of this nodding off, none of this reading my mail,” Dimon echoed at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in October. “If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you’re reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing. It’s disrespectful.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on December 15, 2026.

More on leadership:

• Mary Barra still responds to ‘every single letter’ she gets by hand despite running $65 billion automaker General Motors
• The AI era has a message for every CEO: Adapt or die
• Citi CEO Jane Fraser swears by Warren Buffett’s golden rule for dealing with conflict at work: ‘Never, ever respond to that email in anger’

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Cursor may utilize AI to help programmers code, but just don’t call it vibe coding, CEO and cofounder Michael Truell said.

Ten years ago, programming meant typing code into a blank word processor and editing it manually. But with the advent of generative AI, this type of programming is quickly becoming a thing of the past, he explained.

“More and more, you can take a step back from the code, and you can ask an AI to go do end-to-end tasks for you,” Truell said at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in December. 

Yet, programmers may not want to step back too far, he added, pointing out that there’s levels to AI-assisted coding. 

What is vibe coding?

The oft-repeated term “vibe coding” may seem to encapsulate all AI coding assistants. In reality, it suggests amateur builders or inexperienced AI users trying to bring an idea to life without necessarily looking under the hood.

“Vibe coding refers to a method of coding with AI where you kind of close your eyes and you don’t look at the code at all and you just ask the AI to go build the thing for you,” he said.

Truell likened it to building a house by putting up four walls and a roof without knowing what’s going on under the floorboards or with the wiring.

This coding method may be perfect for AI users looking to quickly mock up a game or website, but when it comes to more advanced programming, things have the potential to go wrong, he warned.

“If you close your eyes and you don’t look at the code and you have AIs build things with shaky foundations as you add another floor, and another floor, and another floor, and another floor, things start to kind of crumble,” he said. 

How Cursor differs—and why it matters

With Cursor, by contrast, programmers can embed AI directly into the integrated development environment where programmers write their code. By using the context of the existing code, or even an entire code base, it can often predict the next line. The tool includes everything from multi-line-autocomplete to full function generation. It can also help a programmer debug their code and explain errors.

Despite being only 25 years old, Truell’s take on AI coding carries real weight. He and three other graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created what would become Cursor as a project in 2022.

Since then, Cursor has become one of the most popular coding assistants out there, with more than 1 million daily users as of last year, Bloomberg reported. Since it launched, the company has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue and amassed 300 employees, according to CNBC.

Cursor received its first $8 million investment from OpenAI’s Startup Fund in 2023. It later raised more millions from some of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz. In 2025, the company closed on a $2.3 billion funding round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation. Finally, as of this month, Bloomberg reported the company was reportedly in the process of a funding round that would value it at about $50 billion.

While vibe coders may be flying blind, Truell said the Cursor coding assistant is the best of both worlds, helping its expert customers get into the nitty gritty details of their code.

“But then in the places where you want to take a step back and you want to ask the AI to do something end-to-end you can do that too,” he said.

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Dec. 25, 2025.

More on AI:

• Trump taps Zuckerberg, Huang, Ellison for tech advisory council—but excludes Musk and Altman
• Wall Street is convinced AI will kill SaaS. History and economics say something else
• Cursor’s crossroads: The rapid rise, and very uncertain future, of a $30 billion AI startup

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Melinda French Gates has shared her secret formula for handling conflict at work. She puts it off.

“If I’m unhappy with work you have done, you will hear from me within 48 hours,” French Gates told Bloomberg Business‘s Leaders with Francine Lacqua podcast this week. “I’m not going to tell you right away, because I need time to think it through.”

“If I’m angry about something [I do this] to calm down,” she added. “That’s on me.”

This practice, she explained, is less about withholding criticism and more about delivering it with honesty, integrity, and grace. The flip side of the 48-hour clock is just as deliberate. If the window closes without any feedback, that means employees are in the clear. 

“If they pass the 48-hour mark, they can be confident that the job they did was a good job,” she said. “You’re not going to get to your performance review and have a surprise.”

This is a practice the billionaire philanthropist has been honing for decades. She cochaired the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable organization, from 2000 until she stepped down in 2024, about three years after the couple’s divorce. 

Today, French Gates runs her own organization, Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company she founded in 2015 to advance opportunities for women and families in the U.S. As part of her divorce settlement from the Microsoft founder, French Gates received $12.5 billion to direct toward philanthropic work through Pivotal. She committed an additional $1 billion each year through 2026 to advance women’s power globally.

Melinda French Gates’ approach to leadership and how it compares to other executives

Bloomberg’s Lacqua framed French Gates’ approach to feedback as her “leadership superpower,” one that requires emotional discipline and candor. 

“Being clear is kind,” French Gates responded, “because I’m giving them feedback so they can actually grow and become better.”

French Gates also described her 48-hour feedback mantra as maintaining personal integrity while keeping the other person’s dignity intact: “gracious, thoughtful, before you go into it.”

Her philosophy conflicts with some of the more aggressive feedback cultures from other executives. Ray Dalio, for example, built his firm’s culture around what he calls “radical transparency,” a system in which employees at every level are expected to deliver unfiltered, real-time criticism, and nearly every meeting is recorded for post-mortem analysis.

“If you start to realize, intellectually, that being really truthful with each other is something that is to be treasured,” Dalio told Business Insider. “It’ll build trust.” 

“There’s a lot of trust that’s going on,” added Dalio, who founded Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund firm. He even recalled to Business Insider a time in which a junior staffer sent him an email grading his performance in a meeting as a “D-” for being disorganized.

So while Dalio prefers immediacy and unvarnished feedback, French Gates opts for more reflection time and a respectful tone.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella takes a slightly different approach. When he took the helm of Microsoft, he pushed to transform a “know-it-all” culture into a “learn-it-all” culture—one grounded in humility, curiosity, and psychological safety. It’s a mantra inspired by American psychologist Carol Dweck, who is best known for her research on motivation and mindset.

“If you take two people, one of them is a learn-it-all and the other one is a know-it-all, the learn-it-all will always trump the know-it-all in the long run, even if they start with less innate capability,” Nadella told Bloomberg in a 2016 interview.

Still, French Gates is clear she doesn’t shy away from difficult conversations. 

“I don’t mind conflict,” she told Bloomberg. “I learned to do it in a way for me that maintained my integrity.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Petrochemical price spikes and shortages from the Iran war likely will cause inflationary effects at least through the end of the year on construction materials, consumer goods, the automative and aerospace industries, and much more, the CEO of Dow chemical said.

While much of the global supply shock focus is on oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and even helium for semiconductors, almost 20% of the global petrochemical capacity is blocked from the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint by Iran, said Dow chairman and CEO Jim Fitterling.

“The die is being cast for the rest of the year for what’s going to happen in the markets,” Fitterling said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston. “It’s like the unwind we saw on supply chains during COVID.

“You could be in the 250- to 275-day [range]. This is not going to be an instantaneous rewind.”

The supply shock will not only exacerbate the so-called K-shaped economic trends, he said, but also create greater haves and have nots between the Western and Eastern hemispheres.

Commodity petrochemical plants in the West—led by the U.S.—largely rely on natural gas-derived ethane as the chief feedstock, which is not directly affected by the war. In Asia, and much of Europe, they use crude oil-based naphtha as the building block. And almost half of Asia’s naphtha supplies flow through the Strait of Hormuz, Fitterling noted.

Already, many Asian plants are declaring force majeure and drastically cutting production because they can’t get the naphtha, said Kurt Barrow, S&P Global Energy vice president for oil, fuels and chemicals research.

“We’re seeing the force majeure of plants in Asia, but we’re not yet seeing the shortages at Home Depot,” Barrow told Fortune. “But there is that potential. Chemicals go into everything.”

How the supply chains unfold

While 150 vessels typically flowed through the Strait of Hormuz each day, Fitterling estimates only about 15 escorted ships will initially proceed daily  when the strait is eventually reopened.

The process will start by prioritizing oil and gas—more than 300 of the roughly 430 stranded vessels are oil tankers—and then likely give secondary priority to fertilizer for agriculture and food supplies.

“Petrochemicals will be somewhere down the list,” Fitterling said, and those ships take four-week trips to Asia. “You have to clear the supply chain out of the Arabian Gulf.”

That’s why the base commodity petrochemical pricing arbitrage between the U.S. and Asia—typically less than $500 per metric ton—has shot up above $1,200, he said. Prices will still rise everywhere.

“We have to navigate a two-speed economy; we have to navigate massive geopolitical disruption,” Fitterling said. “The volatility is off the charts right now.”

On the surface, this is good news for U.S. petrochemical producers. Much of Dow’s growth in recent years is in Texas, Louisiana, and Canada. But Dow, like many other top petrochemical players, is diversified and Dow has major operations in Asia, including large joint ventures in Saudi Arabia.

The petrochemical sector has suffered an industry-wide downturn in recent years, and, in late January, Dow (No. 103 on the Fortune 500) announced a “transform to outperform” plan that aims for $2 billion in savings, including 4,500 layoffs.

Starting with a small industry uptick earlier this year, the Dow announcement, and now a surge from the Iran war, Dow’s stock is up nearly 70% year to date.

But Fitterling isn’t celebrating. He’s bemoaning the volatility.

 For instance, he said he was hoping that relatively lower interest rates this year “would stimulate more housing demand,” but the “inflationary impact” of this Iran war could lead to rising interest rates again and less economic growth.

In the U.S., petrochemical plants will run at full capacity to aid market demand and capture higher profit margins, Barrow said.

“The U.S. is in a really advantageous position,” Barrow said. “Those [ethane] crackers are running as hard as they can to supply the market, but the reality is there’s not enough spare capacity in the world to make up that gap.

“We’re going to have the haves and have nots.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com