Root Cause

In today’s corporate theater of the absurd, CEOs are losing their minds because employees dare to text during meetings. Jamie Dimon is reportedly so enraged he’s taken to shouting at iPads, while Brian Chesky has discovered the radical notion that even he, the genius founder of Airbnb, is sometimes bored in his own meetings. Their diagnosis? Society is collapsing because people can’t sit still and gaze adoringly at PowerPoint slides for an hour. Their cure? Hide the Wi-Fi passwords, impose phone fines, and shame the sinners who check Slack.

But let’s be honest: the problem isn’t that workers are texting. That is merely a symptom of the malaise. It’s that the meetings are unbearable. They are bloated, performative rituals where executives hear themselves talk while everyone else checks out mentally or digitally. If your staff is scrolling through Instagram, maybe it’s because your “mission alignment sync” could have been an email. Forcing people to surrender their phones doesn’t fix disengagement; it just removes the only coping mechanism keeping them conscious. Maybe the execs who are in love with the sound of their own voices and the bombast they can't control should think long and hard about how they can live with the idea of not being the most important or relevant person in the room. That could magically cure a lot of ills.

Meanwhile, the same bosses fuming about “disrespect” are the ones who expect employees to be available 24/7. They’ve trained their teams to live on their devices, and now they’re scandalized when that conditioning shows up in a conference room. It’s not a phone problem; it’s a leadership problem. Employees aren’t distracted because they’re lazy. They are bored out of their minds and they’re multitasking to survive a culture that worships meetings and mistakes busyness for impact.

So before CEOs confiscate phones or install corporate “swear jars,” maybe they should ask themselves a harder question: if no one wants to pay attention when you talk, are the phones really the issue or is it you?