Jamie Dimon doesn’t belief hierarchy to inform him the reality.
The JPMorgan Chase CEO, who runs a $4.5 trillion financial institution with 300,000 workers, nonetheless reads buyer complaints himself, a behavior that, he says, retains him linked to actuality inside one of many world’s strongest monetary establishments.
“I still read customer complaints,” Dimon mentioned on the America Enterprise Discussion board in Miami on Thursday. “If they ask you a question, you’ve got to respond to me directly and not go up that chain of command. The chain of command starts to edit it and fine-tune it. The bureaucracy does want to control you, so you’ve got to kill the bureaucracy.”
For Dimon, forms is a reflex that creeps into any massive establishment and shields leaders from actuality. He sees it as a continuing combat.
“If you’re in a position like mine, you’ve got to break down those barriers all the time,” he mentioned.
“Get on the bus and go to a branch,” he mentioned. “Talk to people. You’ll learn something: something stupid we do, something that doesn’t work, or something they did better at another bank.”
That hands-on strategy, he mentioned, forces him to remain grounded inside a agency with 300,000 workers in 60 international locations.
“Once your mind closes, you’re not going to make a lot of progress,” Dimon mentioned.
Tradition, he added, is what retains an organization from collapsing below its personal weight. “You better be relentless,” he advised the group. “People don’t believe what you write in memos, they believe what you do. They see you fire bad people or a client who mistreats employees. That’s how they know you mean it.”
He’s additionally discovered to worth plainspoken communication. Early in his profession, Dimon mentioned, he underestimated its energy. Now, each message from his workplace is written in his personal voice, stripped of what he calls “corporate pablum.”
For Dimon, the hazard is inside complacency. In his view, as soon as forms takes maintain, “it kills a company’s ability to think.”
