Siemens CEO keeps his inbox below 100 with 2-letter replies—and has no recurring meetings with direct reports: ‘I don’t need to entertain people’

Keeping your email inbox under control can feel like a full-time job in itself—with endless streams of messages making it difficult to separate what actually matters from the noise.

Roland Busch , the CEO of Siemens , has a decisively minimalist approach: skipping email etiquette in favor of efficiency.

“I try to keep my inbox below 100.

If you have more than 100 emails in your inbox, you lose the overview of what’s actually on your plate,” Busch told Business Insider .

“I accomplish this by answering messages quickly and using a few words.” Oftentimes, those few words are simply “OK” or “No.” “I make it simple and fast.

My team is trained to communicate this way.

If I need to write something longer, I dictate my response while walking through the office.” That same emphasis on efficiency extends to how the 61-year-old manages his time with his direct reports.

Rather than scheduling recurring one-on-one meetings, the leader of the $256 billion German engineering company—No.

143 on the Fortune Global 500 —keeps his door open and lets his executives come to him when they need to.

“Because I value efficiency, I don’t have recurring meetings with my direct reports.

I tell them, ‘You come to me whenever you need me,’” Busch 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.” From physicist to CEO of Germany’s largest publicly-traded company Busch joined Siemens in 1994 and spent nearly three decades climbing the ranks before becoming CEO in 2021.

During his tenure at the helm, Siemens’ stock has more than doubled, and the engineering giant is now the largest company in Germany and third-largest in Europe by market capitalization.