Good morning and welcome back to our occasional series where a CEO lets us in on what a typical day looks like.

Antonio Neri rises at 5:45 each day without an alarm.

It's a habit the Argentine-born HPE CEO traces to the 25-mile early-morning bus rides that took him to a military base for middle school and high school, he explained during a recent visit to the WSJ Leadership Institute. The school's environment shaped him. Now he needs routine, he said, adding that even so, "I don't like to rush in the morning, that's for sure."

Neri catches up on the news while shaving, having installed a TV in his bathroom. And he's at the enterprise technology company's Houston office, a seven-minute drive away, before 7 a.m.

"When I don't travel...I'm 100% of the time at the office," the CEO said, explaining that he wants to be accessible to everyone and he values the informal conversations that happen between the time he parks his car and reaches his desk. Another reason? The engineer by training and occasional fine artist had a hand in the building's interior design. "If I were to start all over again, I would be an architect," he said.

Breakfast is the same every day: three egg whites and spinach made by the office cafeteria chef, who knows the protein-to-greens ratio the boss prefers. Meetings follow but not on Mondays, when people are still transitioning from the weekend. "I always empower them," he said of his top executives. "Look, each of the leaders run very large businesses. They have their own cadence."

That said, the executive team does gather for two and a half hours, one afternoon per week, mainly to look and plan ahead, and the CEO has scattered one-to-ones. "Then, you know, there is also a separate meeting, which is basically with the second layer below them, which is all about the performance of the business."

At noon, Neri has a simple lunch -- a salad with either chicken or salmon, a green apple, and water -- and takes half an hour to "reflect on the morning, slow down, maybe read some news."

" At 12:30, I may walk around or keep going with meetings, which normally end between five and six," he said. Those strolls often take him to the engineering building, the campus's data center or its labs, a go-to with visitors in tow.

The CEO said his policy is to leave his staff alone in the evening, which is also when he exercises at home. Six nights a week, he spends 90 minutes on an elliptical -- "I don't like the bike, it's not good for my rear" -- before some core strength training with a Pilates reformer-like Megaformer. There's a cold shower to unwind, dinner of more protein and vegetables, and he eventually retires for the night at 10 p.m. (Last year, he went for a comprehensive body scan, he reported. "Everything is fine, but I felt that I needed to lose that extra weight." Thus the shift to lean meals.)

AI has changed HPE's business, so I asked if it had altered the way Neri manages his day. AI is a productivity tool that can "get knowledge faster and get to the problem much, much quicker," he said, and he and HPE's top leaders use it for constant business updates. But AI has not changed Neri "as an individual, as a leader or as a person," he said.

"I believe in the power of thinking, reasoning, context, all of that."

Lila MacLellan

Editor, CEO Brief

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CEO Brief is written and edited by a team from the WSJ Leadership Institute: Alan Murray, president; Erle Norton, C-Suite Content managing editor; and Lila MacLellan, CEO Brief editor.

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