Jamie Dimon doesn’t trust hierarchy to tell him the truth.
The JPMorgan Chase CEO, who runs a $4.5 trillion bank with 300,000 employees, still reads customer complaints himself, a habit that, he says, keeps him connected to reality inside one of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.
“I still read customer complaints,” Dimon said at the America Business Forum 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, bureaucracy is a reflex that creeps into any large institution and shields leaders from reality. He sees it as a constant fight.
“If you’re in a position like mine, you’ve got to break down those barriers all the time,” he said.
Instead, Dimon prizes what he calls constant curiosity. He starts every morning reading five newspapers and still takes time to visit branches with his management team.
“Get on the bus and go to a branch,” he said. “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 approach, he said, forces him to stay grounded inside a firm with 300,000 employees in 60 countries.
“Once your mind closes, you’re not going to make a lot of progress,” Dimon said.
Culture, he added, is what keeps a company from collapsing under its own weight. “You better be relentless,” he told the crowd. “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 also learned to value plainspoken communication. Early in his career, Dimon said, he underestimated its power. Now, every message from his office is written in his own voice, stripped of what he calls “corporate pablum.”
For Dimon, the danger is internal complacency. In his view, once bureaucracy takes hold, “it kills a company’s ability to think.”