Jamie Dimon Quotes

If you want to be a winner, then compare yourself to the best and acknowledge that it will never happen without hard work.

Davos is where billionaires tell millionaires what the middle class feels.

Don’t you ever turn your back on me when I’m talking. CITIGROUP SENIOR EXECUTIVE JAMIE DIMON TO THE COMPANY’S VICE CHAIRMAN, DERYCK MAUGHAN, AT A BLACK-TIE DINNER. WHEN MAUGHAN TURNED AWAY FROM HIM, DIMON GRABBED HIM BY THE SHOULDERS AND SPUN HIM AROUND, POPPING A BUTTON FROM THE LAPEL OF HIS DINNER JACKET

Abraham Lincoln never denigrated, never scapegoated, never finger-pointed. And he had reason to.

having a strong balance sheet, making sure the right leaders are in place, and keeping costs in line as some of Dimon’s other management qualities.

If you are going to work with Jamie, do what you say you are going to do. The people he attracts and, more importantly, that he is attracted to are people who clearly get things done,

When the post-bailout debate was still at its highest pitch, Jamie Dimon sent Hank Paulson a note with a quote from a speech that President Theodore Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910 entitled “Citizenship in a Republic.” It reads: It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Meanwhile, bank executives bristled—sometimes privately, but often in the press—at any suggestion that they had in any way screwed up, or should be subject to any constraints when it came to running their business. This last bit of chutzpah was most pronounced in the two savviest operators on Wall Street, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, both of whom insisted that their institutions had avoided the poor management decisions that plagued other banks and neither needed nor wanted government assistance. These claims were true only if you ignored the fact that the solvency of both outfits depended entirely on the ability of the Treasury and the Fed to keep the rest of the financial system afloat, as well as the fact that Goldman in particular had been one of the biggest peddlers of subprime-based derivatives—and had dumped them onto less sophisticated customers right before the bottom fell out.

Among all of us there was a leadership philosophy expressed to the entire organization: If there is a problem and you tell me, it’s our problem. If there is a problem and you don’t tell me, it’s your problem—and you don’t want to have a problem!

Smart clients say that the best way to use McKinsey is not to let them insinuate themselves—to prohibit walking the halls of the client’s offices looking for new business. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, for example, will hire McKinsey, but for one-off projects in which the entire body of knowledge generated is transferred to JPMorgan Chase at the end of the project. The firm’s operating committee has to approve any consulting engagement, and the JPMorgan Chase executives don’t take just any consultants; they pick and choose the specific people they want on the project.

Dimon was in his best Warren Buffett–inspired investor communication style: full, open disclosure, underscoring the risks involved, but also articulating the philosophy and reasons behind his decisions.

You really try to evaluate the risks and provide for them. Whether it’s going to be a pleasant or unpleasant surprise, you try to evaluate the risk.

When information doesn’t flow, bureaucracy builds and departments become siloed. Stagnation is the inevitable result.

Three of his greatest characteristics are he’s really smart, he has tremendous energy, and he’ll get into the details with anybody on anything. Most people who get to the level that he is at are prone to be superficial when it comes to running the business; they don’t have enough time or energy to get into the details,” observed Harvard Business School professor Paul Marshall.

If things go from bad to worse, with a recession resulting in higher unemployment—and therefore more loan losses and credit card delinquencies—then expect Dimon and his team to do whatever it takes. That’s the attitude that Dimon brought to Bank One, where he took $5 billion in charge-offs and write-downs before finally staging a stellar turnaround

His philosophy hasn’t changed: to get in front of the problem and tell the truth about what is happening. “If problems exist, recognize them and take corrective steps immediately.

For Dimon steps such as taking write-downs when necessary and always preserving the quality of capital are part of “doing the right thing,

Jamie likes to talk to people. He wants to know them and what they think. He believes that accurate information is essential for everyone: investors, employees, newspaper reporters.

The escalation of home prices that had allowed refinancing to pay off more debt had stopped. With a decline in housing prices, overleveraged borrowers suddenly faced a mounting debt burden—and in the worst cases owed more than the house was worth.

When his management team gathers, the focus is never on what is going well; it’s on the handful of problems that need to be addressed.

Personal responsibility is completely foreign to the highest echelons of the Street. Citigroup’s stock fell 44 percent in 2011, but its CEO, Vikram Pandit, got at least $5.45 million on top of a retention bonus of $16.7 million. The stock of JPMorgan Chase fell 20 percent, but its CEO, Jamie Dimon, was awarded a package worth $22.9 million.

harangued

As often occurs with Wall Street alchemy, a good idea started to be misused—and a product initially devised to insulate against risk soon morphed into a device that actually concentrated dangers.” Money was still cheap in

Run your business knowing it might be sunny, it might be stormy, or in fact it might be a hurricane,” he said. “And be honest about how bad a hurricane might be.” The goal was not only to earn high returns at the top of the cycle but also to avoid giving them back at the bottom.

2. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—are always parent CEOs. But it’s also possible to be a parent CEO even if you didn’t start the business yourself—like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Pat Gelsinger, who recently took over the Intel CEO position, seems to be Intel’s first parent CEO since Andy Grove.

I’ve found the same results at numerous organizations. At a senior leadership event at JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon predicted that the executive sitting next to him would have a 100 percent chance of guessing it. He turned out to be right—but most of the time, we’re overconfident in our predictions. Why? It’s humanly impossible to tap out the rhythm of a song without hearing the tune in your head. That makes it impossible to imagine what your disjointed knocks sound like to an audience that is not hearing the accompanying tune. As Chip and Dan Heath write in Made to Stick, “The listeners can’t hear that tune—all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.

Our constant concern, in writing regulations, was to preserve financial stability without constraining credit or economic growth any more than necessary. Two years earlier, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon had asked me at a public forum whether we had calculated the cumulative economic effect of all the new rules we were putting into place. We did as a matter of course attempt to analyze the costs and benefits of individual rules, and even groups of related rules, but I told him that a comprehensive calculation wasn’t practical. My answer wasn’t very satisfying, and Jamie’s willingness to challenge me in public on behalf of his fellow bankers made him a short-lived hero on Wall Street. A better answer would have been to point out to Jamie the immeasurable economic and human cost of failing to write adequately tough rules and permitting a repeat of the crisis we had recently endured.

mundane

In the long run, though, Wences assured everyone he knew that the cautiousness of the banks would matter less and less. At an event hosted by JPMorgan in the Valley, to discuss Bitcoin, Wences was dismissive when the topic of Jamie Dimon came up: “I think whatever Jamie does or doesn’t do will be as relevant as what the Postmaster General did or didn’t do about email.

This was Chase’s second sweetheart deal in less than a year. Six months before, in March 2008, Chase had “rescued” the imploding investment banking giant Bear Stearns, buying the venerable firm with the aid of $29 billion in guarantees extended by the New York branch of the Federal Reserve—whose chairman of the board of directors at the time was, get this, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

The next day, Adam met with Jamie Dimon on the forty-third floor of JPMorgan’s headquarters. Adam told Dimon that he wasn’t sure there was any way forward for him as CEO. Dimon agreed. No one scandal or decision had taken Neumann down, but it had been a year full of one blemish after another on the heels of a decade in which he could do no wrong. “How could this happen?” Adam told Dimon, according to a person familiar with the conversation. “I did everything you told me to do.” “Adam,” Dimon said. “You did nothing that I told you to.” This wasn’t strictly true. JPMorgan, SoftBank, and WeWork’s other investors had enabled and encouraged Adam for years. It was only when his erratic behavior threatened their own reputations that they turned on him.

Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey formerly of Twitter, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla—all these business leaders regularly attend their companies’ quarterly calls. Let’s take a concrete example. Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil companies, had revenues of about $140 billion and a market value of about $190 billion in 2019. The management held a conference call for investors and analysts on January 31, 2020, to highlight its performance.20 The analysts and investors asked twenty-nine questions. What percentage of these do you think were about the future? More than 70 percent.

The distinguishing thing about Jamie Dimon is that he is very sensitive to the operating issues. He believes in homogenizing systems. He believes in assuring that his management team has very high-quality people who work hard and are dedicated to the company for which they work,

Jamie Dimon is in a position to scoop up assets on the cheap. That’s how you create value for the long term.

As history has shown, what happens after the deal determines the ultimate success. It’s one thing to make an acquisition, and another to integrate it well.

Businesses make lots of mistakes, so part of the point of business is to analyze them, to correct them, to have some sense of urgency about it; to have a management environment where it’s okay to acknowledge mistakes—that way you can fix them,” Dimon added.

I always said capital and conservative accounting are protection. So it’s the preparation beforehand: capital, reporting, and liquidity,” Dimon added.

Dimon is known for bringing his brand of discipline and accountability to JPMorgan Chase,

make sure information is shared broadly and problems are uncovered and thoroughly discussed.

When information doesn’t flow, bureaucracy builds and departments become siloed. Stagnation is the inevitable result. “Bigger companies are always slowing down. Bureaucracy is always growing. Corporate headquarters becomes too self-important,” Dimon says. “What you’ve got to do is always have a sense of urgency; always kill the bureaucracy. Make sure that everyone in corporate headquarters knows that they’re there because there is a banker in front of a client.

From his office on the 48th floor, Dimon makes the rounds every day to committee members who are in New York, stopping by for conversations lasting three or four minutes. Those outside New York are apt to get a short phone call. Although Dimon uses electronic communication, his preferred mode is personal and when possible face-to-face. He doesn’t waste time, but sees these micro-meetings as the most efficient way to following up on issues across the bank’s six business units.

the first thing is that a leader needs to be able to assemble and have a disciplined team. That discipline supports the whole team. It’s the work ethic; it’s the constant facts and analysis, constantly delving into it.

I don’t always do it, but I like to do it in some cases. I have to decide when to do it.