United Airlines Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:UAL) CEO Scott Kirby caps meetings at four hours a day and has a blunt rule for PowerPoint, which is: send the deck beforehand, then come ready to talk.
Kirby Wants Conversation, Not Slide Reading
“My meetings are also quick, and my meetings are almost all conversational,” Kirby told Semafor during an interview last week. “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 says the point is not to pack more tasks into the day. “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,” he said. He spends about three hours a day reading and says CEOs should focus “over the horizon” rather than yesterday’s metrics.
That approach comes as United expands aggressively. United had installed Starlink on 450 mainline and United Express aircraft by the end of the second quarter and expects nearly 1,000 aircraft to have the service by year-end, with the entire fleet targeted for Starlink by the end of 2027. United’s Starlink rollout has become a major part of its customer strategy.
Bezos And Huang Rewrite Meeting Norms
Kirby is hardly alone in rejecting conventional executive routines. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos eliminated PowerPoint presentations at Amazon in 2004. The company instead uses narrative memos of up to six pages, which participants read silently before discussion. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy later said in a shareholder letter that the format makes presenters work harder but helps audiences understand substantive issues and ask better questions.
Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang takes an even less conventional approach. Huang, who has about 60 direct reports, told Stripe that he does not hold one-on-one meetings because he wants information to flow broadly. “Almost everything that I say, I say to everybody all at the same time,” he said.
Airline CEOs Push For Shorter Meetings
Other airline leaders share Kirby’s impatience with long meetings. Delta Air Lines Inc. (NYSE:DAL) CEO Ed Bastian told Great Place to Work that his ideal meeting lasts about 10 minutes.
Benzinga Edge Rankings show UAL stock provides a Value score in the 85th percentile and a Growth score in the 93rd percentile.
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