Airline CEOs Cut Meetings to Make Room for Strategy

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, who has led the Atlanta-based carrier since May 2016, advocates for drastically shorter meeting lengths. Delta currently holds the highest market capitalization among U.S. passenger airlines, serving as an industry benchmark for unit revenue and profit margins.

Addressing corporate culture at the Great Place to Work for All Summit co-hosted by *Fortune*, Bastian stated that standard 30-minute or one-hour calendar blocks are largely unnecessary for efficient operational leadership. “The ideal length of a meeting is about 10 minutes,” Bastian said.

At Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, CEO Bob Jordan has challenged the corporate association between calendar density and executive productivity. Jordan assumed the top role in February 2022 after holding various senior executive positions at the carrier.

Speaking on an executive panel at The New York Times DealBook Summit, Jordan noted that less experienced corporate leaders frequently confuse activity with strategic output. “When you first start, it’s easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership,” Jordan said. “Because what we all find, I’m sure, is there’s no time to ‘work,’ and you confuse going to meetings with the work.”

To address calendar congestion, Jordan blocked off Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons on his schedule, keeping those periods free of formal internal meetings. “It’s so that you can work on things you need to work on,” Jordan said of the reserved time blocks. “You can think about what’s important right now. You can call people you need to talk to.”

Major U.S. airline executives are altering how they allocate corporate time, arguing that conventional, meeting-heavy daily schedules impede long-range strategic decision-making amidst heightened industry competition, multi-billion-dollar fleet modernizations, and rapid technological shifts. Leaders at United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Southwest Airlines have independently instituted strict caps on internal meetings and slide presentations, redirecting executive hours toward long-term operational planning and market expansion.

At Chicago-based United Airlines, Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby has implemented a corporate rule limiting his schedule to no more than four hours of meetings per day. Kirby, 59, has also banned slide-by-slide PowerPoint reviews during internal briefings, requiring executives to distribute briefing materials in advance so scheduled time is dedicated to discussion.

“My meetings are also quick, and my meetings are almost all conversational,” Kirby said in an interview with Semafor. “I want to talk—really, don’t go through decks. If you want to send a deck, send it to me in advance, and then we’re just going to talk about it. But you’re not going to read slides to me.”

Kirby stated that reducing standard administrative meeting hours allows him to focus on macroeconomic trends and future competitive risks rather than short-term performance metrics. “The further you go in your career—certainly by the time you’re the CEO—your job is not to work hard; it’s to think hard,” Kirby said. “If you’re spending your time looking at yesterday’s detailed metrics, you’re doing the wrong thing.”

He added: “My job is to be focused over the horizon—what’s coming that no one else sees yet. It is not to be focused on what happened yesterday.”

Kirby, who received over $30 million in total compensation last year, took the helm of United in May 2020 after serving as the carrier’s president since 2016. His tenure followed executive leadership roles at US Airways and American Airlines during a period of sweeping domestic airline consolidation.

To maintain that perspective, Kirby follows a structured morning routine. Waking naturally at approximately 5:30 a.m. after eight and a half hours of sleep, he begins his workday with physical exercise and roughly three hours of reading. His daily regimen includes reading *The Wall Street Journal* cover-to-cover alongside articles from *The New York Times*, while averaging five magazines and two books per week, primarily focusing on biographies and science fiction.

“Reading, I think, is the number one thing you can do to connect dots, which I think I’m good at that other people don’t see,” Kirby said.

Under Kirby, United has pursued aggressive fleet and route expansions to gain market share against major rivals, particularly Delta. In June 2021, United unveiled its “United Next” strategy, placing an order for 270 narrowbody aircraft from Boeing and Airbus to replace regional jets and older mainline planes.

The airline has also expanded its long-haul international flight offerings out of key hubs, including Chicago O’Hare, Newark Liberty, Washington Dulles, and San Francisco. More recently, United contracted with SpaceX to install Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite Wi-Fi across its entire fleet of more than 1,000 aircraft, with passenger testing scheduled to begin in 2025.

Similar operational shifts are occurring across the legacy airline sector as chief executives seek to protect time for strategic execution.