Company America has entered the period of the megamanager. For years now, employers have assigned increasingly staff per boss in an effort to reduce the price of managers and speed up decision-making.
However there’s one titan of business bucking that development: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. In his letter to shareholders, revealed Monday, the funding financial institution’s longtime chief government praised the agility and possession of small groups in navy phrases. “The teams needed to tackle [specific problems] should be small and authorized with the decision-making ability to move and act like Navy SEALs or the Army’s Delta Force,” he wrote. “This is trench warfare; it’s about fighting for every inch, moving quickly and getting things done.”
There’s some foundation for the comparability with particular forces operations: The SEALs are recognized to work in squads of eight or fewer, for instance. And within the enterprise world, organizing staff into smaller groups can be certain that everybody has a stake within the end result, Dimon argued.
In a crew with too many members, accountability is unfold too skinny, he wrote: “Very often when a management team wants to accomplish something new… everyone on the team says, ‘We’ll get it done,’ meaning they will add it to the long list of tasks already on their plate. But when efforts are 1% of a lot of people’s jobs, it will never get done.”
Smaller groups, with shorter “to do” lists, are incentivized to present their full focus to any given activity, he defined: “You need a team 100% dedicated to the mission—and everyone else supports them.”
In championing smaller groups, Dimon is at odds with the ultra-flat administration mannequin being adopted by companies like Meta, the place CEO Mark Zuckerberg is anticipating staff to do extra with much less within the AI period. The tech big has laid off lots of of staff this yr and carried out worker-to-manager ratios of 50-to-1 in at the least one division—a lopsided organizational construction that’s far past even the outer restrict of the so-called span‑of‑management scale (which measures how flat or hierarchical a construction is by what number of direct studies every supervisor has).
Eliminating layers of administration is meant to hurry up choices and innovation by chopping hierarchy and bringing leaders nearer to front-line staff and prospects, thereby boosting engagement and possession. However in such preparations, junior workers can get ignored, staff can really feel directionless, and managers can burn out—or, as Dimon factors out, accountability for getting issues carried out might be diluted.
Regardless of these dangers, U.S. corporations are persevering with to “flatten,” based on Gallup. The common supervisor’s span of management grew from 10.9 direct studies in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, that means common crew sizes at the moment are almost 50% bigger than when Gallup first started monitoring them in 2013.
Flat buildings typically don’t final lengthy, as staff gravitate towards extra managerial interplay. “What happens in most organizations is eventually either a formal or an informal structure appears sort of underneath direct reports,” André Spicer, government dean of Bayes Enterprise Faculty in London and a professor of organizational conduct, beforehand instructed Fortune.
The final consensus amongst administration specialists is that the best crew measurement is seven, give or take a couple of. Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously captured this concept by introducing the two-pizza rule within the firm’s early days; if two pizzas can’t feed a crew, the crew is simply too massive.
That illustration appears nearly quaint now, however the central idea nonetheless holds. Dimon has landed on roughly the identical crew measurement, solely he made his level—maybe fittingly in a time of warfare—with a navy metaphor.
