Transcript of Jamie Dimon on How Leaders Lead with David Novak Podcast

And, you know, I know it’s going to be a lot of fun for me because I’ve been a part of at least a good deal of your business career. I know your father was a stockbroker and we’ve talked a little bit about him, but I’ve never really heard you talk a lot about your mother. Could you tell us a story about your mom and a leadership lesson that you picked up from her?

Family Values and Early Influences

JAMIE DIMON: Yeah, let me. I’ll do both a little bit. You know, my parents died in 2016, and if you’d asked me before that about credit for what you did and how you grew and stuff like that, I probably didn’t talk about a lot. But now I’m looking back and you realize that very fundamental values you have come from them.

And the values were pretty basic, and I call them Greek but they probably were just values that a lot of folks have. One is, you do the best you can, and whatever you do, you do the best you can. It wasn’t about how you did. It was simply that did you do. Did you give it your best?

The second was, you treat everyone well. If you mistreated anyone, like a waiter or a taxicab driver, that was unacceptable. And as a codicil to that is, you didn’t allow other people to be bullies, which sometimes got you in trouble a little bit.

And the third was do something with your life. But it was about purpose. So my dad was a stockbroker, but he was much more interested in philosophy than being a stockbroker. And the purpose could be. So my older brother became a real physicist. MIT, University of Chicago, Nielsboro Institute. My twin brother became an educator. But it was doing something with purpose. Draw your Picasso and make the world a better place through that purpose. And you could be art, it could be science, it could be teaching, it could be being a parent. It wasn’t anything than just do it well and have a purpose. And they were pretty strict about that, both of them.

You know, my mom. My mom was a Spartan. And when I say that, I really mean that. I mean, she was a beautiful woman, but she was pretty tough. Like, I never. I saw her. The only time I saw her cry was when JFK got killed. I got home that day, and she was crying. Other than that, not even. Who told her she had pancreatic cancer or, you know. And she said, I’ve had a great life. And so she was, I would say, kind of stoic.

She became very early on a woman’s liver. And she also went back to college, when I went to college, so she hadn’t finished college. She’d gone for a year to a Brooklyn college or something like that, and then stopped to be a mother, though she always did things like, oh, yeah, I’ll tell you a quick little story about my mother.

My mother’s. We must be 12 or 13 years old, and my parents are having a glass of wine in the living room. And my father says to my mother something about. Her name was Themis, which means justice in Greek, by the way, I believe the goddess of justice. And he used the word, you’re acting hysterical. And I don’t know if you remember those books about the second mystique or the second sex. And she said, “I told you not to say that, Ted.” He said, “Well, when you’re acting hysterical, you’re acting hysterical.” She said, “I told you not to say that.” And he said it one more time. And she walked up to him and took her wine in his face and left the room.

And he was in shock. And the three boys, we’ve never seen anything like that. Not in my house. And now, of course, the three of us were like, the revolution has begun. Because he was the boss. And it was like, we’re going to overthrow the king. And to his credit, when we all sat down for dinner a little bit later, he came back and said, “I just want you all to know your mom was right.”

DAVID NOVAK: So that sounds like the Jamie Dimon I know today.

JAMIE DIMON: The other thing about my mother, you gotta understand. My mother was a Freudian. So my father kind of was, but my father was more like us. Like, what did they do? But she was like, why did they do it? So I was like, so you have these conversations. I don’t care why they did it. It’s what they did. And so. But because of that, I read a lot of Freud, but before I finished college. I mean, I read almost all of it before I finished college, just how, you know, how people think. And, of course, a lot of Freud was wrong, but it is a real insight into trying to figure out how the mind works.

DAVID NOVAK: Yeah. How much do you think that really helped you as you started working with people?

JAMIE DIMON: Quite a bit. You know, I always try to be, I think, both sides, you know, trying to act and do something, but also try to figure out people and their motivations. All those EQ things you talk about, are they real? Are they authentic? What motivates them? Why treating people respectfully. So, yeah, I do think it helps. In part of your life, you’re always thinking how the world works, but also how people work. As you know, both those things can be very complicated, and we still spend most of our time trying to figure that stuff out.

Early Interest in Finance

DAVID NOVAK: How did the fact that your dad was in finance and was totally indoctrinated in that world, you know, how did that impact, you know, where are you headed? And when you think about your dad, what was the biggest thing you learned from him that you took into the business world?

JAMIE DIMON: So of the three boys, I was the only one who took an interest in finance. I worked from the summer, basically, like, doing mailings and answering phones and stuff like that, when I was 14 or 15. But I was interested. I always read the papers. I always read the business section. I read the sports section. I read the. So he nurtured that. He didn’t make anyone do it. Like I said, my older Brother became a physicist. My other brother, educator, which my parents enormously respected.

But I was interested in that part of the world. And so he’d give me stuff to read. I remember reading a book that Merrill Lynch had done, like how to read an Income Statement and Balance Sheet. I read Graham and Dodd. There’s a big thick one, but there’s a one called the Intelligent Investor. I probably read it when I was 15, and I bought my first stocks when I was about 14 or 15, and so that my interest was peaked.

I wasn’t heading to be a stockbroker. In fact, my father didn’t want me to. His view. You know, a lot of people, like, the grass is green on the other side. He didn’t think it was what I should be doing or stuff like that, but. And I didn’t had to be a stockbroker. But yeah, of course it nurtured my interest. And, you know, I wrote a couple of papers in college about business and stuff like that, so I was interested and. But the interest was more about building something. Building something great. You know, I would read the stories about companies that had really done interesting stuff and built things and bought things and, you know, made more employees and stuff like that.

So, yeah, it nurtured. It gave me stuff to read. I remember a very humbling thing. He came home one day a couple of times. Remember, Yum Brands. Take a business you think you would understand, like a restaurant, you know, and. And you can understand what the profits are and that you actually eat there as opposed to like, you know, chips, which is hard for a kid. But he would. He would. In the back then, annual reports were much shorter, and he would rip out the page that had the price and he’d say, read this thing and tell me you would pay for it. And for anyone out there, I don’t care how smart you are or how good I think you are, you would be humbled by that exercise. And so it really becomes a discipline about what makes you think about things and how do you think about values. And that’s so cool, so great.

Harvard Business School Experience

DAVID NOVAK: And so you grow up in this rough and tumble neighborhood, you get the street fights, and here you end up going to Harvard. Okay, I don’t really see you as a Harvard guy. I know you could definitely, you know, do well there. But that had to be a different kind of place for you.

JAMIE DIMON: So I went to Tufts University. I was one of those deferred admits. So, you know, you’re going to go, but back then you had to work for two years. I worked at a consulting company that doesn’t exist anymore. And I did well at school. And I didn’t go in very nervous like that.

But my wife tells the story. Cause I met my wife in the second year there, as you know that, you know, I was the guy in the class, like, wearing the leather jacket, a T-shirt and jeans. Not prep. And I hadn’t gone to Harvard undergrad or Yale or Princeton or a lot of that.

But I loved it because the Socratic method, for those who don’t know, you sit in a classroom with 80 people, you read cases, and then the real world is messy. So this is not like theory anymore. They talk about capital markets. It isn’t like supply, demand curves. It’s like, why did things trade this way? And why do people do those things? And why do so many business ventures succeed and so many fail?

And we learn that even today, if you and I went there and sat through a good case as your friend Andy Pearson taught, and I went there when he was there. You learned a lot from listening to other people. And that is a great. I still do that. You sit around the table. Why? What? When you went to other companies or things.

And so I liked it. People were afraid of public speaking, had a hard time. People who weren’t a little proficient in numbers might have had a hard time, but I kind of loved it. Made some great friends there, who I still speak to, you know, Steve Burke, my wife wasn’t that happy with. Made some people kind of nervous. But, you know, when you settle in, once you see the people, you get to know them and having fun every day. It’s pretty good.

Meeting His Wife

DAVID NOVAK: So you meet your wife Judy, at Harvard. When was that aha moment. You knew that she was the one.

JAMIE DIMON: So she was introduced to us by a friend, Mandel, you may actually have met at one point along the way. And she pointed out to me. And Judy was very pretty, very smart, and I was so I was interested, intrigued, right off the bat. She had asked to meet me, you know, and she thought I was just, I don’t know, kind of cool or something like that. She talked about wearing sunglasses and T-shirts. And I really rarely wear sunglasses. I’m not quite sure what she was talking about.

But I called up her house. She lived with like six other women. One of them was the president of the Finance Club. I was the vice president of Finance Club. And I was speaking to her about some event we were doing. And then Trudy got on the phone and said, “Hey, do you want to play some Tennis.” I said, “Well, sure,” we hit it off right away, she says. Went to have a malted shake or whatever that day, she says, I made her pay, which I don’t think is true, but. And then she had a boyfriend, by the way, who wasn’t at Harvard Business School, but we started seeing each other almost every day for dinner after that, and. And that was that story.

DAVID NOVAK: Fantastic. And how long you been married now?

JAMIE DIMON: Married, 43, 42 years.

Marriage Advice from Jamie Dimon

JAMIE DIMON: I mean, when you give advice in this, you know that you learn a lot. You just do it well, like all the time. And so I’ll tell you some of the things I think we did well. First of all, we were devoted to each other and kids, so we wanted to have kids, we wanted to have a family. She had a professional career. But for anyone out there, the younger people who listen to this, that’s when you have a job and kids and you’re still like 28 years old. That’s when you’re kind of burning the candle at both ends. And now you have real obligations to family, your wife, your kids and stuff like that.

I always tell people. So the lessons, and I didn’t always do these right, is you need to make sure that you take care of your mind, your body, your spirit, your soul, your friends, your family. It doesn’t happen automatically. And you and I have seen a lot of people professionally in any profession, and maybe not any profession, they start to neglect that stuff. And it’s bad. It’s bad for your health, it’s bad for your family. You end up getting divorced. So it takes time and it takes attention, and that’s the most, probably the most important thing.

I think we never did this, but I think it’s very smart for, you know, I was working so hard that we took family vacations. My wife and I very rarely took a vacation as the two of us, which is now like a standard thing. You know, people now, like, they have the. There’s a name for it. I forgot the name for it is my kids do it. And I think it’s just great, you know, and then we also get the grandkids a little bit. But I think people should do that, focus, you know, spend time. At the end of the day, it’s going to be time and quality.

Jamie’s First Job After Harvard

DAVID NOVAK: And so, you know, you meet your wife at Harvard, you get that education that everybody craves for and you loved every bit. Tell us the story of how you landed your first job out of Harvard.

JAMIE DIMON: When I graduated Harvard, I was going to Wall Street, you know, not necessarily want to be an investment banker, but they pay a lot and you learn a lot, you know. And I just figured that first couple of jobs, just learn as much as you can. And I had offers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers, which are three of the best.

But Sandy Weil ran the firm that my father was at, and I knew him a little bit. I’d worked there in one summer when I was in college. Remember the old days, data entry. I basically did data entry for budgets. And I had written a paper on the merger of Shearson and Hayden Stone. My mother sent it to him and he sent me a letter saying, this is a great paper. You know, would you come, would you want to come talk to me?

So I went to talk to him. He offered me a job working. He had just sold Shearson, Hayden Stone to American Express and get a job in the investment bank. And I told him no because, you know, Goldman is basically pay me a lot more. But more important than that is you get a lot more experience. And I thought, why would I give up, you know, great experience, Goldman and higher pay.

And then he called me back. I’d become a Baker scholar at Harvard Business School, which was important to him. He likes that kind of stature and status, which is the top 3 or 4% of the kids at the school. And then he said, you know what? I just sold a company here to American Express. He was very down to earth back then. I don’t remember if you knew him way back then. And American Express was more of a bureaucratic company. They said, I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I would love to have you here as my assistant. You’ll learn a lot, you’ll see a lot. You can always go back to Wall Street.

And that really intrigued me because I’d never been in. I’d really never seen a big corporation. I thought he was interesting. He was very different than corporate America. He’s more like a Jack Welch type at the time. And I did figure out if it didn’t work out, I could always go back to Wall Street or something. And I told you my interest was in building something. It wasn’t necessarily being an investment banker. And he had built Shearson Hayden Stone. And then he had these big dreams about what might happen to the American Express and financial services. So I took the crapshoot and joined him for a lot less pay, a lot less pay. But I didn’t really care that much about that. I really cared about the experience.

Lessons from Sandy Weil

DAVID NOVAK: Tell us a story about where you think you picked up and gleaned the biggest insight you learn from Sandy. Well, and he was iconic. He was very much like a Jack Welch.

JAMIE DIMON: You know, so I go to America. He wasn’t the president, he became the president shortly after that. So Sandy, he was down to earth. He worked all the time for the company. He’d have breakfast, lunch, dinner, selling, buying, hiring, recruiting. Always thinking about mergers. Always what we can buy, what we can buy. So like a lot of the mergers we did over the next 20 years were because relationship he had built up over a long period of time.

He hated the bureaucracy in American Express. And you know, one of the things that we all learn in life is when you work at certain types of things you don’t like, you also learn very good things, what not to do. They were hugely bureaucratic. So they had, they had the board and they literally everyone prepared for the board meeting and then they had the pre board prep and the pre, pre board prep and it took every month.

And you remember Bob Lipp, who’s still doing great, I speak to him every now and then. Bob Lipp hated that stuff. A lot of the big banks had. It was just bureaucratic, a lot of politics inside and people didn’t share information and who’s up and who’s down. And internally it was less of a meritocracy, more of a who do you know and where did you go to school at least early on. And he just, he just hated all that stuff.

In fact, Bob Lipp, of course you may remember he, when we got to Travelers, when he joined us at Commercial Credit is like you couldn’t make a presentation. The board with the PowerPoint like he just said, we’re not doing it and you’re not prepared. So I’ve never prepared a presentation for the board ever. Not once. I’ve done it for big deals we did and stuff like that.

And so, Sandy was always hustling that stuff. Always wanted to know the facts and the BS and the bureaucracy and was a fanatic about expenses and growing. And we bought Lehman, we were there. He’s always out with the salespeople, shaking hands, doing the dinners. You have a lot of CEOs who just wouldn’t do that. They just are too busy to actually hang out with their own people. So you learn all those lessons.

DAVID NOVAK: Do you think leadership has evolved in terms of what really makes a leader today versus in those days? And do you see a difference?

Inside the Mind of Jamie Dimon: Leadership Lessons

JAMIE DIMON: There is definitely a difference. And when you ask questions like that, I always think about what changed and what stayed the same. So let me just do what’s the same, okay? Because I think you have to be very careful about it.

Like, Andy Pearson was one of the great CEOs of all time. Before Jack Welch. But the mind power, the analytics, the detail, the repeat, the drive to go out to the store, to observe what’s going on, to listen to people, to do it again, branch by branch, product by product, service by service. A lot of companies don’t do that, and then even politics inside a company stops a full undressing of your own performance.

Like, how are we actually doing? Why, if you’re in Pizza Hut, not just why is Taco Bell maybe doing better. Why is McDonald’s doing better, this company overseas doing better. And if you don’t do that, it’s very hard to become a great company. So I don’t think that’s changed. I think some companies rely too much on outside advisors and all that.

Another thing that has not changed is great administration, meaning, you look at it and you’ve seen it, where some people who run companies, they’re a hot mess. People don’t know what their jobs are. Meetings don’t start on time. They don’t return their phone calls. They’re too busy.

I was used as an example, a military example, but Ike Eisenhower, during Normandy and D-Day, 150,000 troops, 7,000 ships, hundreds of aircraft, 30,000 paratroopers, food, guns, bullets, timing, planning. And you know, you got to run stuff. So you may not be the greatest analyst in the world, but you got to run it. And people have to know what their jobs are and how you’re doing it.

Heart and Curiosity in Leadership

The last part’s changed a bit, and not for everybody, but I think it’s the most important part. And you know, you were part of this, too. But when I started working, there was a lot of the pounding the table and the politics. But I think what really makes a great leader is heart and curiosity.

Now, recognition. I want to explain to your listeners a little bit how I see recognition and what I learned from you. Heart is you actually give a damn. It makes you authentic. You’re not trying to be perfect. You make lots of mistakes, but they see you. People know you are or they aren’t. How you treat people, what you say, do you do what you say, do you follow up.

For everyone on the podcast, you’ve all seen the BSers out there, people, they think they’re getting away with it. They generally aren’t. And people don’t want to work for those people. And you can read all these leaders, whether it’s military or history or business, you earn trust and respect. You earn it by every day showing that you’re going to work as hard as they do. You care as much. You’re trying to do the right thing. You’re not trying to be right. You’re the first person to say I made a mistake. You’re the first person to share credit. You’re not the first person to blame the other person.

And curiosity is the same thing. But you’re always learning. I used to go to some branches, some stores with you in the restaurants and you’re always learning. You can go anywhere. I can go to any branch at JPMorgan Chase today and sit down with the tellers. I’m going to learn something about which systems Bank of America does better. Why do we do this? Why does this take so long? How come we can’t do this in the branch?

But there’s a humility to that. There’s a humility to being curious and learning. And I still see here a lot of people don’t want to get on the road. They don’t go to a call center because they don’t want to hear about the mistakes they’re making and what they can do better from someone who is junior and doesn’t have the same pressure they have.

I love what Home Depot does. For those who don’t know, Home Depot calls corporate headquarters “store support center.” That’s why they’re there because there’s a store, and in that store you have people coming in. And how you treat people, not just the customers, but how the employees are treated reflects how the customers are going to be treated.

So it’s that whole combination of heart, curiosity, giving a damn, which makes you authentic, which is why people want to work for you. And you have much more of that today in general in the workplace, which I think is a very good thing. A little more empathy, a little more thought.

The Power of Recognition

And then you always talk about recognition. But do you remember me telling you what I learned from you about what recognition really is? Recognition is really telling someone else what they did, acknowledging that you didn’t do it, they did it. It’s acknowledging to recognize someone else. You have to acknowledge, you have to be curious, you have to understand that you’re constantly trying to figure out what you can do better and that the boss’s job is to help everyone do the best they can.

I was never good at it early on in my career, but this whole part about recognition, that “thank you.” Sending a note to an employee who customers sent a great letter about. So it’s constant learning, constant recognition, and people like it.

Early on in my career, when I particularly was on Wall Street, I always thought recognition meant that people would be pounding the table for more compensation. But even with investment bankers, it was not true. They actually want to be appreciated for the job they did. It made them feel better as human beings. And you’re acknowledging that they did something for a client that was great, it made them feel important.

I remember one year I decided to ask the senior investment bankers what they should get paid. I thought it might be a terrible idea because at the end of the year you have all these terrible fights about stuff like that. And I said, don’t put in a memo, just sit down with me. Tell me, did you have a good year? What do you think? What did you do well? Just verbal conversation.

It’s amazing that most of them were much more honest that way. They literally said, you know, I did this, I think this. And I think my comp should be around A, B and C. And it was when you didn’t do that that they came in with high demands. And so I think just showing respect to people goes a hell of a long way.

Like those who watch Ted Lasso. The beauty of that story is that Ted Lasso, he didn’t know anything about soccer, but he can get them to play as a team, get rid of the demons each one have. Get them to respect each other more, get them to have fun doing it.

Fundamentals of a Turnaround

DAVID NOVAK: As you were moving up with and taking on new companies with Sandy Wild, you and Lip, Travelers, Commercial Credit. You were always buying these companies and then turning them around. What did you learn are the basics of a fundamental turnaround? What do you have to do?

JAMIE DIMON: Yeah, so if you look at what we did, we were quite successful, but it was not strategic. It was more opportunistic. So you’re right. We bought companies that had nothing to do with each other sometimes. And all cultures are very different.

So the first thing I did was literally sit down with the management team like dinner, get to know them. What do you read? What do you look at? How do you run your joint? What reports do you have? You can see instantly that a lot of people step up right away and they want to build a great company. They tell you what’s wrong. And a lot of people, they defend themselves. They’re blocked. They won’t look at the numbers the right way—they look at them the way that makes them look better, which of course is a disaster for any business.

But the first thing is walk in their shoes, and go to the belly of the beast. I remember at Travelers, the insurance company, I went to get to know all the actuaries and all the underwriters. When we bought Salomon Brothers, I put an office on the trading floor, the fixed income trading floor, the belly of the beast right there. They were shocked. I started to go through all their trades and all their positions and take them to dinner and then start fixing it.

Looking back, we never said, we’re going to do a transformation. We just sat down with the business heads and said, what do you do? What are you doing? What are we going to build? What are you going to grow? How come we’re not doing this? How come this company is doing better? Should we fix the technology? Are expenses too high? Is bureaucracy slowing us down? And then just start working it, over and over and over. And of course strategy is important, but execution often is more important.

We bought already existing companies that usually were doing something poorly and we got to buy them rather cheaply and we basically fixed them. It doesn’t mean we did the best in strategy. And you learn that cultures are different. You learn you shouldn’t just impose the way you do stuff on them, because they exist for different reasons, with different regulations and laws and requirements and you’re hiring different types of people.

Dealing with Bureaucracy

But one thing that I learned, a lot of companies have bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is always growing. There’s always politicians, they’re always making it worse and they’re always waiting to see are you going to be one of those or are the politicians going to own you.

So a lot of those companies, the corporate staff tried to own the bosses on the floor. “Oh, we’ll take care of that, don’t worry your pretty little head.” I remember I got to Bank One, when I found out they were having some major sales conferences, they didn’t even tell me about it. I mean, I was livid. I had to go.

And so you learned the cultures are quite different and then you start working it. And then also when you build things, if you decide that their systems are terrible in some area, you don’t go in and say “your system is terrible. How could you put in that stupid thing? I’m going to redo this for you and get McKinsey or someone to come and rewrite it.” You form a team inside to do it. You bring in some outside people. So by the time it’s built for the stores, the restaurants, they built it, you just nurtured it and it came out a way that everyone thought was the best way.

And I have learned all the tricks along the way to figure out the politicians and the BSers. It’s the meeting after the meeting, it’s coming and presenting numbers in a different way than the company presents the numbers, is backing out allocated expense, when that includes rent or basic stuff. It’s the people who you can see in the room no one will disagree with them.

It’s the people when they go on the road and you start asking the loan officers or salespeople or branch managers, “hey, what can we do better?” And they’re kind of twisted in their chair. They don’t like the fact that branch managers are saying, “well, why can’t I set my own hours? Why can’t I do this and why can’t I do that?” And they get upset. And so you’re seeing this all the time. These not good managers. Some are bad, some are political, some are just rigid.

I used to go literally sign checks. Some of these companies, I look at every vendor thing for a month or two to see how they’re spending money. And then you’d be shocked. They’re buying stuff, they have no idea what they’re buying, agreeing they’re signing “okay with me.” But they don’t even know what it is. And meanwhile, the person responsible for it is not getting the bill. I could go on and on about the things you learn by going through these.

Jamie Dimon’s Leadership Journey

JAMIE DIMON: We’ll get back to the interview in just a second. Before we do, though, I have a question for you.

DAVID NOVAK: Have you downloaded the How Leaders Lead app on your iPhone?

JAMIE DIMON: If you haven’t, take 20 seconds right now, go to the App Store, search for How Leaders Lead, and download the How Leaders Lead app. In the app, every day, you’ll get a two minute video that’ll give you a leadership insight from one of our amazing guests from our podcast to inspire you and to really get your mind in the right place before you start your workday.

DAVID NOVAK: So go to the App Store, search How Leaders Lead, download the How Leaders Lead app, and start your day every day with two minutes of leadership wisdom.

Learning from Setbacks

DAVID NOVAK: I’ve watched you in action, and you clearly have high performance standards, but you have a ton of heart. That’s why people basically do want to work with you and stay with you. And you said, as you were building all these companies with Sandy Weill, you said he didn’t really mentor you. You learned a lot by watching him and then applying what you saw to how you would go about leading, but you put a lot of heart into those businesses and then Sandy ends up terminating you. You get fired by the guy, and that had to be traumatic, especially when you’ve given so much of your heart to those companies. What sticks with you the most about that experience that you’ve tried to take forward in the way you lead?

JAMIE DIMON: So our relationship deteriorated from 1994 to 1998 when we did Citi. He set up a thing which I vehemently disagreed with, which was, they gave me the title president, which I didn’t ask for. And he had told John Reed, “Jamie’s pushing me back,” which I never did. I don’t believe in fake titles. I was going to run the global investment bank and then they changed it to they’re going to be tri-heads of the global investment bank. So this is a global complex business. I was like, tri-heads? Are you kidding me?

So they had tri-heads and co-heads of almost every division reporting to co-heads Sandy and John. Just think of the complexity of that. And I told them, “This is going to destroy the company.” I said, “You guys…” John Reed wasn’t used to being talked to like this by someone. So he liked me, but he thought I was a little too aggressive. I said, “This will destroy the company. And the second we announced this, people would be digging trenches, stockpiling ammunition to see who’s going to win these battles. Sandy, John, Jamie, this one, that one.” I said, “And by the time you jokers figured out, we’re going to lose a lot of good people.” And I actually was the first casualty.

Sandy called me up. I had 100 kids at my house recruiting for Solomon Smith Barney. And we had a management meeting at 4. He said, “Can you come at 12?” I said, “No, I’m having a big buffet breakfast for these people.” He said, “It’s important.” So I go up there, I go to a room like this. Sandy and John are there and they said, make a bunch of changes. And they listed change A, change B and change C as “We want you to resign.” To which I said, “Okay.”

So I knew the game. They already talked to the board. They already lined it up. I was actually shocked about A and B. I was not shocked about C. And I should have known that. You’ve got to ask Sandy about the motivation. John Reed wanted to leave. I was going to be the natural successor. That’s one of the reasons John wanted me at the company. Sandy convinced John that it’s more important these two guys get along. And I think a lot of people think—a lot of the board members told me, because I knew them all—a lot of it was that if I stayed, Sandy would have had to go and he didn’t want to go. And obviously, I think the board made a mistake. And this is where boards should do the right thing and not the thing that makes the boss happy.

Lessons learned. Our relationship had gone south a lot before that. I called him up after a year. He didn’t call me. I called him up after a year and said, “Sandy, it’s time we got together.” He treated me—they treated me terribly on the way out, literally, they threw me on the street. Like, they gave me an office and then called me up right before Christmas. “You got to leave the office.” I said, “Well, why?” They said, “Well, we’re not going to give presidents of the company offices anymore.” I said, “Yeah, but you already have 5 ex-presidents and vice chairmen with offices.” They said, “Well, this moment going forward, not you.” I said, “Really?” They said, “Yeah, you have to leave by December 30th.”

Anyway, I saw him a year later and I walked in and he wanted to do it at the Four Seasons. He was nervous. I was not. I said to him, “Sandy, I’m going to talk just a minute about the past. I don’t think you did the right thing for Citibank, but I want you to know that I made a lot of mistakes. And whether it was 60-40 or 40-60 doesn’t really matter.” And I listed some of my mistakes, and some of my mistakes were lessons forever. Like, I acted—some of the things I did, I acted out of anger. I was so angry about some of the stupid things. It just flew out of me sometimes. And, you know, as you know, that almost always backfires. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong.

And you learn that some people, it’s just enough isn’t enough. And it’s not about being proud of the beautiful thing you built. It’s being about what does it mean for you, how does it look for you? And ultimately, it destroyed the company after I got terminated.

Life After Termination

DAVID NOVAK: I remember you picked up boxing. What did that do for you?

JAMIE DIMON: So what happened was I went—they asked me, “Would you want to do press that night?” And I said, “Yeah, I want to do that from home.” “Would you want to see the press?” I said, “Yes.” I met the senior team. I wished them all the best. That night, maybe 50 or 100 people came to my home, and they said, “Don’t tell Sandy.” And it was like going to your own wake. They were toasting me and my net worth, not my self-worth, was involved. So I never felt bad.

Some people outside treated me like a leper, like, “Stay away from this guy.” And other people, like, literally, I’d be running through the park. “Yay, Dimon! You showed them.” I was like, “I got myself fired is what I did.” But immediately they kicked me out right away. So all of a sudden, you’re working 80 hours a week to zero. So I was like, “What the hell am I going to do?”

So I made a list of stuff. I literally went to the bookstore and bought like 30 or 40 books. And instead of reading the paper in the morning for an hour and 15 minutes, it was two and a half. And then I made a list of those things I want to do—visit my brother in Denmark. I drove cross country by myself. I had a friend doing boxing at a hole in the wall gym downtown. And so I did all those things, and the only thing that was on the list I think I did not do is climb Kilimanjaro. I took my family on a long trip to Europe, luxury leisure type of trip. Took them on RV trips. And I was thinking about what I wanted to do. I mean, I was on your board. It was always fun for me.

Learning from Board Experience

DAVID NOVAK: Yeah, well, I remember that at that time you agreed to go on the board. And I remember Andy Pearson, who we’ve talked about a little bit, he was talking about putting this board together, and he said, “You know, you got to get this young whippersnapper, Jamie Dimon, to come on the board. You’re going to be around for a long time. You and him will be a great team.” And boy, was he right. And what’d you learn just serving on the Yum board because it’s such a different business than the finance world?

JAMIE DIMON: Yeah, well, so first of all, I think it’s great to see how someone else runs it. I love talking to CEOs. “How do you run your joint?” Because a lot of CEOs run it differently, and they’re all good. Some are terrible. But how do you run it? What do you do? What do you spend your day? How much fun do you have?

And it’s the same with the boards—they’re like juries. They could be bureaucratic, they could be politicized. But Andy, as you know, put together like one of the best boards of all time. You know, Ken Langone was on the board and Bob Ulrich from Target, who ran a great company. John Weinberg had run Goldman Sachs and Bob Holland, and Andy ran it. I still would say Andy was the best to watch of anyone I’ve ever seen about how he just ran the meeting. All your guys would come present and how they’re doing here. And he always had a very good way of saying “that’s not exactly the way it works.” I forgot how exactly he did it, but it wasn’t wasted time. Got right to the point, was never rude. Tough, but never rude. Always evaluating the people, how they thought about a problem, how they thought about an issue, how they attacked the problem.

You guys had tons of problems when we were there. And each one—how you attacked it. You had the GM’s problem, then the distributor went bankrupt and all these things. But you learn in life how people deal with problems. The board was completely open. It was a lot of fun. We went to taste your foods and you always took us to branches, restaurants, and you just learn how people think.

Even if you don’t join another board—I’m not on any other board now—I tell people it’s a really good thing to see how other people do things because I go to anything where other CEOs are there or the Business Roundtable or Business Council stuff that you’ve done. I’m taking notes when I hear someone did something. “That’s a neat idea. Why don’t we do that?”

As a matter of fact, my board—I still do since we last met. So you did it every board meeting. And I’ve been doing it every board meeting since Bank One. I still do it today. And it was your idea. And for those on the podcast, it was telling the board honestly everything important since you last met. Good, bad, ugly. It could be the product, the food, the tasting, the profits, the China business. An honest assessment from the CEO. Like I said, the good, the bad, the ugly—it’s a great tool. I still type it out and I still keep it. In fact, I was speaking today about having some of my people who run the businesses do it themselves—”since we last met”—as opposed to a presentation. And so I still learn things from tons of other people how to do things better.

DAVID NOVAK: And so you were on the beach, as they say in finance terms. You didn’t have the job. You come to the Yum board, you’re working on that. What process did you use and what did you learn from it as you worked your way into the CEO job at Bank One?

Jamie Dimon’s Career Transition After Being Fired

JAMIE DIMON: I was very deliberate, okay. So I was fired in December, but I had to negotiate out. It took me to March or April. So I decided I’m going to take the summer off, take the kids around the world, and start kind of really thinking about September. But I did take a lot of phone calls. I took everyone respectfully. Some were, you could call it almost insulting what they were offering me. I made sure the headhunters knew I wanted to work the major folks out there.

When I came back in September, I was always polite and responsive to everyone. I had an office. I started seeing people all the time, and I had ideas. I’m going to start my own merchant bank. I wrote up documents, I spoke to people. I saw myself working with people, getting partners. Kind of wild as an idea. Didn’t love it. I could have just been my own investor, started talking to people. I went to see Camel Ngon about, what is it like? I didn’t love it. I thought about just teaching or writing fundamentally.

I realized I wasn’t done with the big game yet. And I had a lot of offers. Some were CEO, some was… I was offered to run the global investment bank of one of the big European investment banks. I went there to see the people in London and had dinner with a bunch of them. And after dinner, I said, there’s no way I’d work for these guys.

Hank Greenberg called me up at AIG and I said, going from Sandy Wild to Hank Greenberg, you know, have to have your head examined. And Jeff Bezos, who I hit it off with in 1999 looking for president. And he and I hit it off. I still talk to him. He’s an outstanding guy. It was just a bridge too far for me. I didn’t necessarily fully understand the business. I had to move a family to Seattle. I love the idea of never putting a suit on again, you know, getting a houseboat somewhere.

But it came down at the time to Home Depot and Bank One. I love those people. I thought, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank. I went down there running with Blank and Ken Langone. But when I first met them, I said, “Just so you guys know, until you called me, I’d never been in a Home Depot. So it’s not my natural habitat.” And they were very much like, “We don’t care about that. You’ll learn. We want the guy with the heart and the soul.” And I went to stores with them and stuff like that. And I actually shopped houses in Atlanta. I mean, we were taking it seriously, looked at schools for the kids.

And then Bank One was there. And Bank One, as you know, is a troubled Midwestern bank and probably would have surprised people I went to it. But it was my natural habitat. When I look at a trading book or a loan book, I mean, I’m used to it. Moving to Chicago was going to be hard, but I wasn’t done yet. And they offered me chairman, CEO. And I decided I put half my net worth into it. I tied my shoes to it. I was going to go with the ship or not.

Very much like we did with Sandy Wild back at Commercial Credit/Primerica, build it. Make it where you can build something great. Don’t cry over spilled milk. I still deal with a lot of CEOs who complain about their own companies endlessly. And I always say, put your pants on. I mean, just grow up. The world was never perfect. No one ever said they’re going to hand you everything on a silver platter. Business is tough. People disappoint you. And so I decided to go for that. They made me chairman, CEO. I put half my money in, move the family. I called you up, got you on the board. I needed some fresh blood on the board.

The JPMorgan Chase Merger

DAVID NOVAK: That was a lot of fun watching what you did there. It was great. And then you turned around Bank One. It was a great success story. And JPMorgan Chase decides to come and acquire Bank One. What did you learn orchestrating that with the JPMorgan Chase CEO at the time, Bill Harrison? How’d you bring it all together?

JAMIE DIMON: Yeah, so Bill Harrison had been not my direct banker, but I knew him from way, way back. And as you know, Bill’s a real quality guy. And so we did that deal at the end of the summer of 2004. But he and I had started talking in ’02 or ’03, and I’d go see him regularly. And I told you guys on the board that there are two or three very natural mergers for us – one was Fleet, and one was JP Morgan Chase. And JPMorgan Chase fell by the wayside because he’d gotten too big. And they bought Chase, but because Bank One did better and better and they were having some tough times, it kind of came in that target range again.

And so I went to see Bill. Bill and I kept on talking. He said to me at one point, “You know, I can’t do a deal now. My shareholders will kill me. But it’s so natural. I don’t have a successor, really, you know, would you promise me that you will call me if you’re ever going to do something?” And I told him, “Bill, I cannot promise that, but I understand about the industrial logic.” And he and I started talking about the industrial logic, the people.

Now, in reality, he called it a merge of equals. We got the premium, but we also got the control. If you remember correctly, I was ordained to be the CEO literally from day one. So I wasn’t the CEO from day one, but the board was gonna be 50-50, and I was gonna be the CEO in two years unless 75% of the board said no. So that meant four of my directors have to vote against me. And you may remember the last minute, there was a little fight at the board. Our board. You guys were at dinner at my house in Chicago.

DAVID NOVAK: Oh, I was a big part of that fight, as a matter of fact.

JAMIE DIMON: Yeah, like. But some people said, “Don’t do the deal. You can’t trust these New Yorkers.”

DAVID NOVAK: If Jamie can’t be the CEO day one, we can’t do the deal. Well, that was a good reason to keep it in Chicago. They were coming up with all kinds of reasons, you know. And I said, “Look, if Jamie can’t work with Bill Harrison for two years, then there’s something wrong with Jamie Dimon.”

JAMIE DIMON: Yes, sir.

DAVID NOVAK: And he said, well, you remember, I’m not going to mention his name. He said, “But, well, you’ve never been in a boardroom, you know, like that. You’re missing something here.” I said, “Well, I do have a hell of a lot of common sense,” and, you know, there’s a big fight, but anyway, the rest is history.

Building JPMorgan Chase Into a Powerhouse

JAMIE DIMON: Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. And you make a judgment call in life and we all thought we could. I knew I could trust Bill Harrison, and he wanted to leave. They needed a successor, and they needed someone who’s going to run it.

Bank One had just gone from a terrible company to a mediocre company. JPMorgan Chase was part of a lot of deals taking place but it never completely performed. So in reality we’re putting… But the industrial logic was perfect. Two not great credit card companies and credit card requires scale – put together. We had a great retail system, they didn’t, but they had great branches in New York. We both had middle market businesses. They had an investment bank, we didn’t. But we could bring those products and services to the clients around the United States. They were global, we were not.

And we just started working it like literally just began. And I remember starting these business reviews by business – payments systems, ops by country, investment banking, middle market banking, consumer banking, credit card – and never said we’re going to transform. We just went to work at making it a better company. Being honest assessment, setting real targets for ourselves about what we should be performing. Removing the management that was political and bureaucratic.

Bill and I spoke all the time. I was running most of that stuff but he was completely supportive. In fact there was one time that someone said, “You know, Jamie was very rude at this meeting we had.” I was criticizing him for these insurance deals they thought they were doing to protect the company from auto warranties. And he went on and on that Jamie did this and Bill said, “Excuse me, that did not happen.” He said, “Well you weren’t there.” He said, “I was, I was in the back of the room and he was asking you a lot of very good and smart and tough questions.”

Bill was a little surprised how deep I went into all these businesses. At one point he said to me, “Are you going to do this all the time?” I said, “Yeah, pretty much.” He didn’t always agree with what I was doing, but he’d say, “It’s your company, you know, you’re going to be CEO in a couple months.”

But then it came to one guy that I wanted to ask to leave who I thought was a great politician but a complete self-server, took care of his buddies and was kind of a hatchet man for Bill himself. And I went to see Bill, I said, “He’s got to go.” And Bill said, “Well I totally disagree with you, he’s been key here.” And I went home that night and I came back in the next day and I said, “Bill, we’ve done everything together here. I’m completely discreet. I would feel much more comfortable if you go ask some of the other senior management people about what I said – is he trusted, is this, is that.” And Bill, to his credit, went out and spoke to four or five people and came back and said, “You were right and I should have known.”

So we were kind of lockstep every step of the way. Even since he left, which is now almost 20 years ago, anything he could do to help. And even guys like Dennis Weatherstone, who had been a former CEO of JP Morgan itself, called me up with attaboy every quarter. There’s some very sweet guys. John B. McCoy, the older guy who started Bank One and literally went from one branch to a thousand, he would come see me every now and then just to say, “You’re doing a great job kid, that’s great.”

Leadership Philosophy and Gold Standards

DAVID NOVAK: You know, one of the things that, being on the board and watching you in action, you establish gold standards not within the financial industry, but also other categories that might be better at processing or whatever measure that you’re going after and you really drove those gold standards home. And you talk about working it. You know, if somebody asks you about strategy in those days, you’d say, “I don’t really care about that strategy. Our strategy’s always changing based on what we see.” But you’ve never been one – or maybe you’ve changed – you were never one back then to be talking about your five year plan or your 10 year plan. You didn’t spend a lot of time on that. You spent a lot of time working the business up against gold standards. How do you think about strategy?

Jamie Dimon on Strategic Execution vs. Strategic Planning

JAMIE DIMON: Yeah, so the first thing I always do is the first thing we’re not. And you’ve seen this before in some of these big companies. They’re always talking about, I call it strategic. So instead of like, are you doing a good job running your business? You know, remember Bob Lub used to say about strategy, it works, just do more like don’t know. And they had outside consultants. I got rid of all that kind of stuff.

And so my first goal is just run the place well, consolidate the systems branch by branch. Then you develop plans. They were strategies. These things work. Do more of these branches, close these things down, take all the products and services of JP Morgan into the middle market. The middle market does 35% of our US domestic investment banking now. And that was a strategy. You have the engine and just get more products across this very costly enterprise.

I got rid of lots of the company that didn’t fit. And you may say I sold this. Close it down. But every part of the company fits and they feed each other. Private bank and middle market use the consumer branches. The investment bank is hugely benefited by the private bank and by middle market banking. Payment systems are hugely benefited by being in the consumer business and the wholesale business.

And so there are these large strategies, but I didn’t let people spend that much time BSing about it. Like, we set the strategy and now we have a plan.

So, you know, even like we started building the chase wealth and they have to do this. We have a lot of skunk works going on. We always have that. So, like one which probably started when you were there was, you know, we had these branches in the wealthiest parts of the world, but we didn’t do very much money management like wealth management. And I had wanted to do a test in White Plains, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. And we did the test and it didn’t work. And then people here, you got to catch that you’re wasting money. I was like, well, let’s try again. Did the test, didn’t work. And sometimes you have to just keep modifying it, like, just keep turning the dials a little bit. That business now manages a trillion dollars.

DAVID NOVAK: Okay.

JAMIE DIMON: And so once we got the strategy right, but this was by testing. So sometimes you should kill these hobbies and sometimes you should. But there’s like 10 of those. Like how we built. We’re in all 50 states now, you know, building branches how we. When we bought WaMu, which is all consumer, we put on top of that private banking, middle market, small business. So the cost of the branch system was all of a sudden fee and lots of the businesses.

So there are these big strategies. But I think the problem with strategy when people overdo it is they spend a lot of time making excuses for why they’re not running a good business.

DAVID NOVAK: It’s sort of like the way I would describe what you just described is you work, you keep working on what’s working and then you work on what isn’t, and it just keeps, keep evolving that as you go forward.

JAMIE DIMON: Yeah. Always very questioned, I see. You know, we have to transform the business because you are doing that over time. But you’re, but you’re doing it. You have to do it at a very detailed level and a strategic level. And, but you know, in a lot, a lot of businesses, you’ve seen this. You know, if you have a second rate execution, you’re in trouble. You know, if you have a first rate execution, you can run a pretty good business whether or not you have a perfect strategy.

Navigating Through the Great Recession

DAVID NOVAK: You know, Jamie, you’re famous for a lot of things, but you’re I think most famous for how you navigated our country and JPMorgan Chase through the Great Recession of 2008. What was your big takeaway from all that took to really get that done?

JAMIE DIMON: Well, first you got to go before the crisis started. And it goes back to my upbringing with my dad is I had seen markets go up and down. I remember him coming home and people’s incomes went down. I remember in 1974, the 1982 New York City was desperate, you know, so this great Wall Street, it was desperate. You know, restaurants were closing, stores were closing, apartments were being sold for back maintenance. Literally, people forget that 1982.

And so I even way back then when I was with Sandy Wild at Travelers Primerica, et cetera, I used to do presentations for all the stockbrokers about how we have to be able to deal with all these ups and downs. And you know, part of the name of the game is just continue serve your clients, do a great job. And the downs, not just in the ups and like don’t over celebrate the rising tide, you know, but be prepared for the tide going out.

When I got to JP Morgan, I was very tough here about capital, liquidity, profitability because I knew that the at the fan early on we would have had a real problem. So before that and then get real risk management in place. So if you talk to the folks here, they were shocked at the detail. I’d go into every position, every risk, the what ifs, how bad can it get? And I made them do stress tests that, that they were like, it’ll never happen. I said, I don’t care what happens. And they buy. It’s kind of what happened, by the way.

I said, I want to know if it happens that we survive to serve our client, because you can’t tell me it’s not going to happen. So risk management is much more being prepared for a whole range of outcomes and what ifs than the shit at the fan.

But we were ready by then we had more liquidity, more capital, more profitability. And you may remember the risk committee, the board, at one point, I left you guys the board. I said, I can’t even say I had to go to the risk committee. And we were going through literally client by client and country by country and loan by loan and helping people.

DAVID NOVAK: We went and watched that. You actually had us come watch.

JAMIE DIMON: You watched the sausage get made. But people say, what did you do different? Nothing other than we already had teams, we already had an army, we already had things to go. So the risk committee used to meet once a week for a couple hours. And all of a sudden it was meeting and it was kind of more formalized, you know, reviewing certain things. And all of a sudden it was meeting five times a day, every day for a year. Okay. And I mean every day. And I mean, you know, going to 10pm and 5am because you had Asia, we had to be up for that.

And we were on calls all the time with regulators and governments and clients and. But the machine was working. And then the formality, when you were there, the formality went away. It’s like, hey, David, don’t come up and make us a presentation about the mortgage problem in Denmark. Bring up whoever you need to describe and tell us what they want to do. And so we were making battlefield decisions to help, mostly to help clients, because JP Morgan was actually in quite good shape. And then you just learn how people operate under stress and strain. I mean, some people are great and some are just children.

DAVID NOVAK: So. All right, and so you literally helped take the country out of this crisis. What was the single biggest, darkest moment that you had during that period? And how did you. You said, some people don’t really know how to handle crisis. How did you personally handle it?

Navigating Crisis: The Bear Stearns Acquisition

JAMIE DIMON: You know, I’m. So first there was Bear Stearns. So the world was rocky. Subprime was going down. Some hedge funds had problems, quant funds were having problems. Markets were down. Bear Stearns stock had fallen from I think it had a market cap of $20 billion to $15 billion to $10 billion, which is a real sign of a problem in a financial company. And then I got the phone call on March 13, Thursday 2008, I was actually having dinner with my parents, at a Greek restaurant down the street here. And it was maybe 9:00 at night. I had to leave the restaurant because I couldn’t hear. And Alan Schwartz, the CEO of Bear Stearns, said, “Jamie, I need $30 billion tonight, otherwise we’re going to go bankrupt in Asia in the morning.” And even I said, “Alan, I don’t even know how to get $30 billion. But let’s, you know, have you spoken to the Secretary of Treasury?” And he had.

I called up, literally our senior people. I said, “You know, get dressed and go to the office.” And we had hundreds of people come in that night start going through the books of Bear Stearns. And I told Hank Paulson, “Look, let’s just get them to the weekend. That gives us 48 hours to figure out if we could save Bear Stearns.” And so we had this lifeline, which I won’t go through with the Federal Reserve about how we’re going to do that. That was our idea, by the way.

And now it had 1,000 people, 2,000 coming in doing what you call due diligence. Every loan, every asset, every real estate, HR policies, litigation, can we handle it? You know, what are the integration, what’s going to cost, how much would it write down? And we did, you know, probably six months of work in two days and bought Bear Stearns that night, signed the thing that night.

That is, that kind of thing is the moment where you’re breathless. It was the same way I felt when I signed the document. It was like one signature. Merged Bank One and JP Morgan. So I sit in my office late at night and I’m signing that piece of paper. I know I’m taking an extraordinary amount of risk, which we think we can handle. And I’m also subjecting my people to a tremendous amount of work because people forget it’s not the deal. You know, the press writes about the deal, the deal, the deal. It’s the next day, 30 or 40,000 people are working on stuff that is brand new to them. People are going to lose their jobs, people are going to consolidate stuff. They’re worried, they’re nervous. It’s, you know, you’re literally working seven days a week.

But the worst moment was so Bear Stearns was bought and we thought that might be saving the system. But six months later, Lehman didn’t make it. Lehman didn’t get bought. Lehman disintegrated. And that caused disruption around the world of payments and systems and money and things shouldn’t happen that way, which they did fix by the way. But even after that, AIG, the largest insurance company, Citi Bank America is one after another. But the Fed finally, and we did a lot of stuff, but there was really the Fed at one point putting all these programs in place that by March of ’09 the markets were hitting all time bottoms. But I knew we’re getting near the end because the programs were going to work and it was going to release stress in the system. Markets stopped going down, people could take a deep breath, clean up the crap from the past, but go on.

And so, but that was a lot of stress. And I think I just do it the same way, which I try to. You know, this is what I find with stress. Okay. The only thing that really satisfies me when I have stress from work is to work, like going to work. I mean I could get depressed and really stressed out on a Saturday, but if I come to the office on a Saturday or Sunday and I start working on the problems, it immediately goes away from me because I’m doing something, stuff like that. And so. But away from that, it’s just a, get your sleep, get your exercise, you know, do something that takes your mind off it for a while with some stupid TV show or something like that. When you have little successes, even the middle of a crisis, get the people together for a little cocktail party and thank them, little things like that to just relieve it.

DAVID NOVAK: And you’ve had so many successes. You’ve built JP Morgan Chase into by far and away the number one financial institution in the world and one of the best companies in the world. You know, looking back, what would you say has been your biggest disappointment at JPMorgan Chase and what did you learn from it?

Learning from Mistakes: The London Whale

JAMIE DIMON: People would probably point out the whale. We lost billions of dollars in this terrible trading thing. And I was of course heavily criticized legitimately. And of course, at one point someone asked me on an analyst call, “Is it just a tempest in a teapot?” I said, “Yes,” but at that moment I didn’t know how bad it was. I had been told something which was not accurate. And I remember coming back late one night, I said, “I want to see the actual positions, the actual what ifs, the actual stuff,” reading the stuff. And my heart stopped when I realized what we had done.

And I immediately got on a call with analysts and said, “We’ve lost $2 billion. We’re going to lose more. We made a… It was badly managed, a bad strategy, barely reported, barely done. It’s my fault and I’m sorry.” It’s something that had gotten away, wasn’t properly reported. I won’t go into. But I do remember. But again, I don’t consider that my worst moment. Just, it was just terrible.

And I told, I actually got all the PR people and communications people together. The manager said, “You know what? They’re going to crucify me. They’re going to crucify our company.” I said, “Forget that. We’re going to lose some money. We’ve got clients around the world. When we wake up tomorrow, we’re going to serve our clients around the world.”

And I remember driving in the next day, I was very early, like 6:30. But they called me up, said, “Jamie, all the TV cameras and all the newspapers are out. Go into the basement so you could avoid them.” I was okay. And the closer I’m getting to the building, I’m saying, wait a second, I’m not going to do that. So I got out of the car they all come running up to me and they say, “What are you going to do? You’re going to lose your job?” And I said, “You know, we’re going to fix this problem.” I said, I looked up the building. I said, “But I want you to know how proud I am of the 7,000 people in this building serving their clients around the world every day. And the great job they do.” And that’s how I felt. It wasn’t, that was like a stupid problem. It wasn’t.

But I’ve learned so many lessons, you know, like, and look, you’ve been part of it. You know how to run meetings and how to notice politicians. But the biggest mistakes are always the same people. When you put the wrong people in the job, you know, that means that you’ve… It takes a while to figure it out. You know, bullshitters are pretty good at it. They’ve been bullshitting for 25 years. The people who report to them are going to be hurt. The company won’t do a good job. It takes you a while to figure out to replace them. And that’s… And you get better at that. You just get better at it over time. You see the pattern recognition. Are they respected, are they treated, are they honest? As opposed to, are they the best chest pounder and the best salesman and they work their ass off and things which may be important, but that doesn’t mean they’re a good leader.

DAVID NOVAK: So the whale was what everybody would go to. When you look at it, what was your biggest disappointment in it? The whale was an event you knew you could get over it. Did you have one bigger than that or was this…

The Challenge of People Decisions

JAMIE DIMON: Yeah, I would say there’s some people, ones I don’t want to mention their names because I think it’s very important you’re not shit all over people that I missed, you know, there was one at Bank One who you might remember, and I missed it. And I remember my management team coming in and it was late at night. They said, four guys, which I think this is fine, but most people allow this. Four of them said, “Jamie, sit down.” I said, “Okay.” They said, “We’re going to tell you something. Don’t say anything, just listen.” I said, “Okay.”

And they proceeded to tell me how this person we had hired running this part of the business was a bad guy, a liar, dishonest, you know, said things and did things. And I listened and I didn’t know. And sometimes you can’t tell people. So what I said to him is, “I hear you with a smoke there’s fire. Thank you for saying this to me. It’s now my problem.” And they were right.

And then there are a couple of ones at JP Morgan Chase, right where I made the decision, I hired that person in Bank One, or I made the decision, I missed it, or I took too long, you know, and I hate it when I make a change and people say, “Thank God you did that.” You know what I always say to them? “Well, why didn’t you let me know earlier?” You may be the boss, but I love reading history and I love reading some military history. And you see the same thing where there are bad generals.

DAVID NOVAK: You know, Ron Daniel, who ran McKinsey, always said, “David, he said you’re gonna learn.” And you learned this. It sounds like it’s your biggest disappointment is that, you know, the business will always run and your results will vary, but the thing that’ll disappoint you the most are the people that you put your trust in. You know, so I think that’s basically what you’re saying here. You know, I know many people have asked you to run for president. You know, I even told you once, I remember, we have a dinner at some Greek restaurant. I said, “I will quit whatever I’m doing right now. I’ll be your campaign manager, I’ll do whatever you want, but we need you to run for president.” You know, what have you learned about yourself that’s kept you from jumping into that briar patch?

On Not Running for President

JAMIE DIMON: I’m not sure I learned a lot about myself. But look, I do think there are skills that people have that in business world that may translate to the political world, but I think it’s a mistake to automatically think that’s true. So I think working hard, being authentic, having leadership is true. But there are also these political skills and you’ve seen a lot of business people run that fail immediately. And I may be better than them, but I still don’t have all those political skills. That’s one.

The second is I literally think you should kind of have a warmup before you go for president and a warmup could be Congress or Senate or governor. You’ve seen people learn those skills before you go for the big enchilada. I know the world from this position I have. So I think that’s important. But I would have had to have started earlier.

And I also have this unbelievable… Unlike some other people, I have this unbelievable job. You know, I think, you know, my country’s very… Right next to my family is my country. And this company, I’m just so proud of what it does for 80,000 Americans, 6,000 American companies around the world, our market, cities, schools, states, hospitals, the community outreach program. I’m damn proud of it. So I think I add a lot here. I’d be giving it up for kind of a wild goose chase.

I tell people, had I run and won when I was walking into that White House, I’d be waving goodbye to my family for four years. They’d be saying, “See you, dad.”

DAVID NOVAK: I’m not sure.

JAMIE DIMON: I’m not sure my wife would have gone with me there. And so I just… And it is subjecting your family to some very tough stuff. And some people are prepared for that. I was unprepared for at the time. And so I would never rule it out. I mean, I don’t like making profits to be like, are you private? I mean, I’m not making any promise to anyone. If I change my mind, I change my mind. But I think it’s hard. I’m 68 years old, as you know. I’ve had a health problem or two. So I just… When you put it together, it just didn’t seem like the right thing for me to do.

DAVID NOVAK: And you’ve traveled the world and you know, JP Morgan Chase has such global impact as you, as you mentioned, you know, and as you’ve met global leaders and you’ve met the top leaders in the world who, if you had to pick out one person who has impressed…

Leaders Who Inspire Jamie Dimon

JAMIE DIMON: You the most and why there are several. I mean, several are terrible and I’m not going to give you their names. And these may surprise you a little bit. Macron, very smart, very tough. Says the same things publicly as privately. Very complicated politics, you could say, made some right decisions, wrong decisions, has the right vision for France, you know, getting entrepreneurs, business growing, stuff like that.

The guy who runs Greece, Mitsotakis, has done an unbelievable job. And he would tell you, basically, “I figured out what policies we needed and then I did the politics.” Whereas most politicians do it their way around, it’s all about politics. And they try to fit the policies into what they promised, which, you know, policies badly done don’t work.

And then a lot of them from history, you know, I mean, I’ve been reading a lot about Ike Eisenhower. Just the competence of the man. He surrounds all the great people he ran. Everyone spoke up. There was no game playing. He got rid of all the policies, able to deal with all the complexities. And George Marshall, I mean, so I get a lot of inspiration from people not just existing.

Ulysses S. Grant. I mean, they write him up as a drunkard, he was extraordinary. But as president, at one point, the Ku Klux Klan comes back in, I think it was Mississippi. And he used to this guy, the principled and ethics. He said, the Black people, they weren’t called Blacks at the time, are citizens of this country and they’re going to be treated with all the same rights as everybody else. And he sent, I think it was Sherman or Sheridan down with troops to remove the governor. There was no prevaricating. There’s no game playing. There’s no if it’s bad. It was terrible politics if you wanted to win the Southern states. And so there are a lot of people, Abe Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, that you just learn from watching what they do and how they handled difficult situations, difficult people.

The Future of Global Relations

DAVID NOVAK: As you think about, you know, the situation that the world faces today, it’s very complicated. You know, I mean, it’s a very scary world we live in today. Describe the world you see five to ten years from now. I mean, you know, you think we’re going to be in this for a long, long time, or, you know, the China relationship. I mean, how do you see the world? And you know, there was a time when, you know, the global economy was everything and China needed us and we needed China. You know, everything seems to be, you know, on very shifting sand. How do you look at it and how should we think about it?

JAMIE DIMON: Is really complex. And I think the way I look at it is it’s Russia, Ukraine war. It’s the aiding abetting of Iran and North Korea, of what’s happening in Ukraine. It’s Iran’s nuclear program. It’s the terrorism in the Middle East against Israel. And then China’s part in that kind of. Not with it. They’re not part of that evil part, but they’re aiding, embedding it with microelectronics and buying oil and gas and all these various things. It’s dangerous.

And you’re talking about… This is not the economy I’m worried about. This is the future of freedom and democracy in the world. And the only way to deal with something like this, if you read history, is deal with it. Don’t just pray it goes away. It may not go away.

When this war started, I told people how dangerous that’s almost on three years. And you’re talking about Iran being very close to having nuclear weapon. China is trying to divide the Western world quite openly, they say in it, “Well, we don’t want the American system to prevail, and we don’t want the reserve currency. And we want every country not to be part of the American economic system.”

And I think the public should understand that. The military alliance we have and the economic alliances are very deeply related. And our national power is based upon our moral power, our economic power, in addition to our military power. And the moral power is still real. We have the greatest country on the planet, the freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of enterprise. Those freedoms, if you took down our barriers, the immigration, 4 billion people move here because they want those freedoms. And then they’d invent companies.

And I think Americans underestimate the power that, yes, we’ve had flaws of a country and we should focus on some of that, but we shouldn’t denigrate. This is a shining light, shining city on the hill.

And so to conquer these things, you need to make sure America stays strong. So America, when I talk about China, we have all the food, war and energy we need. We have peace in North America and South America. We’ve got the Atlantic and the Pacific. In China, our GDP per person is $80,000. Theirs is 15. They import 10 million barrels of oil a day. They’ve got terrible demographics. Their neighborhood is a very complicated area. They’re surrounded by people who’ve been enemies in the past, and they’re pissing them all off. Not because any America’s done, by the way, but the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Russia. It’s a tough part of the world, and they’re kind of hemmed in.

And so we have the better hand. The question to me, I worry about is we need to play that hand. Only American leadership can keep the world free and safe for democracy. Only American leadership. And we’ve got to keep together the military and the economic alliance, because the economic battlefield and these are directly related, is about national security. Like, you know, where do we get our penicillin from and where do we get our graphite from, and where do we get our rare earths from and stuff like that. But it’s also about unfair economic competition because that becomes beggar thy neighbor.

And, you know, you have Europe in a very tough spot now because they have very high energy costs. We have very low energy costs. So it makes it very hard for the industry. And then China is, you know, can sink their car companies. So, you know, you have a very complex situation.

So, you know, my view is build America, remind start with our own Civics, you know, we owe our country why it’s so important what freedom and democracy about build our economy. And at the economic power is the root of all those things, allows you to do all the other things and then have a very sophisticated role about how we’re going to maintain American leadership. But for America, we’re not doing it out of just the goodness of our hearts.

And I also think it needs to be more real politic. We lecture our… I go all around the world, as you did, and we’re constantly lecturing people about their labor laws and their climate and their… All these things. And I’m not against furthering human rights, but it should be subordinated. So it needs to be subordinated to national security interests and you know, realpolitik.

There’s that great quote when Stalin was telling FDR and Churchill at Yalta, I think, or Potsdam, I think it was Yalta, that he wanted to do something. And FDR said, “Mr. President, the Pope wouldn’t agree with that.” And Stalin leaned forward and said, “Exactly how many divisions does the Pope have?” And that’s the game we’re in. And we do these dumbest things in the name of good that actually make us weaker and make our allies weaker. And so we have to be very thoughtful. And I’ll be reaching out to the new administration on that. We reached out to the old administration. We’ve hired national security experts to help our clients.

And then a little bit of a mea culpa. We all made a mistake. And this isn’t… It should be acknowledged. This is something you have to, we have to whip ourselves about. We should have, all of us should have been a little more thoughtful about China going back about 10 years. And you know, at one point they entered WTO in 2000, but they were starting to abuse it by 2012, you know, and we should have been more thoughtful then. They were really thinking it through and we were just kind of happy go lucky we, all of us, you know, and so was the government.

But now’s the time to say, okay, no, they can’t be mercantilists. They can’t, you know, beggar thy neighbor economically. They can’t do certain things they’re doing. We have the better hands. I’m not telling Americans, you know, worry about saying, just, let’s just make sure we build a really strong company. Let’s make sure we have unparalleled military strength that is unquestioned. Because the best way to avoid a war is to be strong. I can borrow other things. So and so I just think we gotta fight for that America and remind ourselves and educate our kids and educate people why it’s important. Educate people on the interlinks between those things.

Lightning Round

DAVID NOVAK: You know, it’s, you know, we’ve covered a lot of fronts here and it’s been fun, you know, having this conversation. I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions and are you ready for this?

JAMIE DIMON: I’m ready.

DAVID NOVAK: Three words that best describe you.

JAMIE DIMON: Tenacious. Relentless. Tenacious and relentless. And I love to learn all the time.

DAVID NOVAK: If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be?

JAMIE DIMON: Abe Lincoln.

DAVID NOVAK: What’s your biggest pet peeve?

JAMIE DIMON: Bureaucracy.

DAVID NOVAK: Who would play you in a movie?

JAMIE DIMON: My wife would want Harrison Ford or George Clooney. But they are obviously better looking than I am.

DAVID NOVAK: What’s a Greek delicacy everyone should try?

JAMIE DIMON: Moussaka.

DAVID NOVAK: The last time you put on boxing gloves and punched someone.

JAMIE DIMON: Oh, God. That was 15 years ago.

DAVID NOVAK: Your favorite memory from the US Open tennis tournament.

JAMIE DIMON: Opening a Business Week one day and seeing Steffi Graf serving in a picture. And then I looked really closely what was behind her. I could see my little daughter, who’s 8 years old, looking at her. That was the best moment for me and my daughters. My granddaughters have been, you know, there’s big jumbotrons, whatever. They’ve been on that a couple of times when they’re watching. I try to take them every year.

DAVID NOVAK: What’s the one thing you do just for you?

JAMIE DIMON: Read history.

DAVID NOVAK: Your most prized possession?

JAMIE DIMON: My family.

DAVID NOVAK: If I turned the radio on in your car, what would I hear?

JAMIE DIMON: Just music, you know, just general music.

DAVID NOVAK: What’s something about you few people would know?

JAMIE DIMON: I’m actually a pushover. And I’m actually quite easy. I think that might be just a little bit of a… If you ask all my family members, who’s the easiest one when it comes to where you eat, where you travel, what you do when you get up, they would say, “Dad, I just want to do whatever makes me happy.”

DAVID NOVAK: What’s one of your daily rituals? Something that you never miss.

JAMIE DIMON: Reading the papers in the morning.

Family Life

DAVID NOVAK: All right, we’re out of the lightning round, and I just got a few more questions and we’ll wrap this up. Okay, I got to ask you. Tell us the story of what it was like when you had your first child.

JAMIE DIMON: Well, that’s, you know, I think for everyone that’s like an unforgettable experience. And I remember my wife had some complications of that, so it was a cesarean. So she came out looking good, but I remember holding her, my little daughter with a little teeny rib cage and then she stretched and just holding this little stretching baby and then she yawned and hiccuped, which she did quite a bit. And holding a new life in your hands is extraordinary.

DAVID NOVAK: You now have this incredible family with three daughters and seven grandchildren. And you’ve now got a two year old grandson. You have all these daughters. What was it like when you finally got the grandson?

JAMIE DIMON: Well, first of all, I have two wonderful son-in-laws and you have a daughter. You probably worried like I did earlier, like what if you don’t like the son-in-laws? Like what if they get married? And you know, I adore these kids. They’re both wonderful fathers and husbands and son-in-laws and they were delightful to be with. We all travel together, we like their families, so we’re like one happy go lucky.

When we finally found out there was a boy, I mean it seemed hard even to contemplate it for us because I never had a baby boy, but he’s quite, I put him in quite a pampered category. All six of the other kids pick him up and carry him around and play with him. And I don’t think he has any idea what he’s going to have to learn to grow up with. I mean, I can imagine all those girls, you know, whenever he brings home a girlfriend, eventually they’re going to all want to vet the girlfriend, I bet.

DAVID NOVAK: So, you know, you and I both had our health issues and you’ve struggled with cancer and you know, how is that, you know, how much did that really change you or did it?

Facing Mortality and Personal Growth

JAMIE DIMON: It did, you know, and I think it changed me over time. I don’t think you realize immediately what it does, but as you know, when someone says you have cancer, your life changes. And I tell a lot of people everyone knows they’re going to die, but that when they say it, all of a sudden it’s like in your face. And you have to contemplate dying all the time until even now, you know, you’re a survivor, but all the time until they say you’re in remission.

And of course, radiation and chemo is, it could be absolutely devastating. And I remember I wouldn’t go tell my parents. I told my wife, you have to tell them because I didn’t want to tell my parents I may die before them.

The thing that changed, it does make you live a little more deliberately about how you run your life and what you do and how you spend your time. It wasn’t like I was going to change. I love working, I love my country. It didn’t change that, but it did change how you deal with certain people and certain issues. And I think because of that, when I had the second health issue, I was being wheeled into surgery and I knew it was maybe not even 50-50 I would survive that. I didn’t have any regrets because the ones I might have had, I actually fixed the first time around.

DAVID NOVAK: You know, a mutual friend of ours, the late head of Goldman Sachs, John Weinberg, he had this line which I love, he said, “You either grow or you swell.” How do you manage not getting a big head? I mean, just think of what you run and everything you’ve accomplished.

Leadership and Humility

JAMIE DIMON: And this is my belief, because I’ve—and I always quote him too, in that. Because when people get the big job, it’s shocking sometimes how they act. And all of us who get the big job, it actually creates more humility because how little you know about certain things and yet you’re responsible for them.

But other people actually—I think what it is, it’s how you’re grounded, and that grounding comes from your whole life experience. But it’s the insecurity. It’s the insecure people who, when they get that big job, it makes them so insecure that the way they fix it is by controlling the meetings, by having friends of Bill, by having friends of this, by everyone knows this is what they want. They never want to be embarrassed. They never want to look bad. They’re the ones who won’t go on some of these trips because they’re afraid of being criticized.

And you see these traits and you see them with you. And it doesn’t have to be the CEO of a company, could be the CEO of a division and other people. There’s none of that, you know, I tell people, and you know how insecure—your listeners may not understand that when you run a company.

So make believe I’m running a trading desk that does mortgages, and if I want to do mortgage, I have to call that guy who runs it. He knows more about it than I know or anybody else. I say, hey, what about this? What about that? Why don’t we do this? But maybe he gets promoted and now he’s running six divisions, mortgages and credit and equities and stuff like that. Well, all of a sudden he’s an expert in one and he’s learning five. And then he gets promoted again. Okay, now he’s an expert in six, and he’s learning 30.

And so the higher you get, the more insecurity it breeds, which is why I think that people, some people, they turn inward, they get scared, they block it, they cover up their anxiety. And other people, they’re more like—they realize they don’t know that stuff and they reach out for help and they have that curiosity and recognition and all those things about heart and curiosity, but I think it’s how you’re grounded. I don’t think it just happens.

Succession Planning

DAVID NOVAK: Yeah. You know, one of the things about you, Jamie, is you’ve been in position for a long time at JP Morgan Chase. And many would call you like the John Wooden of financial expertise, coaching, whatever. I mean, you are the John Wooden. And it was very difficult when John Wooden retired to ever replace John Wooden. How do you think about replacing yourself? And do you give yourself high marks on your process that you have for that?

JAMIE DIMON: Yes, I—so far, you know, obviously the decision is the most important, but the board’s fully engaged, that my board knows everybody. They see them freely, they take them out, so there’s no blockage of those folks. We have the same list. Everyone has about all the skills you need and stuff like that.

But at the end of the day, and I put character and culture as a sine qua non, heart, curiosity, work ethic, drive, grit. You better have a little bit of grit. It’s this basket of things that make up a human being. It’s not one thing. And we have people with great skills across the board. And I think the board believes that.

And I believe that I took the board through successful succession planning, unsuccessful succession planning. So what worked and what didn’t work? Several people on my board have been through it, so they’ve told the board how they approach and stuff like that. So we’re doing it pretty systemically, and we think we’ve got people who’ve got that full broad range of capabilities.

I don’t like it when someone says, you know, what are you looking for, a technologist or a marketing person? No, no. You’re looking for that whole set of stuff that they carry. The culture they got, the energy, they bring people with them. They don’t have to be perfect at any one thing, but they have to have that spectrum of stuff where people actually want to work at the company. They get the best out of the other people. And I think we have many people who can do that.

Final Advice

DAVID NOVAK: You know, last question here. If you could give one piece of advice to any leader, what would it be?

JAMIE DIMON: I would go back to make sure you have heart and curiosity and give a damn and understand that you don’t know it all. And you’re not even the expert anymore.

DAVID NOVAK: Jamie, I want to thank you for all this time and I want to thank you for your friendship. You know, you’re always there. You’re always there. I mean, we don’t get together all the time, but when we do, we pick up from where we last left each other. And last year my wife passed away, and in February, you and Judy were there. And you’re there for people when they need them most. And I thank you for being that kind of friend for me. You’re an amazing guy and I’m blessed to have you as a friend.

JAMIE DIMON: David, you’ve always been there for me also, and both you and I love you and it’s great space entirely.

DAVID NOVAK: Yeah. Thank you very much, buddy. Appreciate it. You know, there’s just nobody like Jamie Dimon. He’s my friend and I know I’m biased, but I believe he’s one of the best business leaders of our time. And I can tell you he is the absolute real deal. He doesn’t just talk a big game about giving a damn and having heart and grit. I’ve seen it close up and personal by myself.

And he is not afraid to roll up his sleeves and dive into the work, no matter how hard that work may be. And I know you picked up on this, but Jamie has no patience for the BS and bureaucracy that might get in the way of the work. That’s a powerful mindset and one we need to all learn from.

So I got a question for you. What’s getting in the way of the work that’s really going to move your organization forward? Is it too much bureaucracy, internal politics, endless strategery? This week, be on the lookout for it and push back against it. Because if you want to get results, you’ve got to get past those distractions and do the real work of running your business.

So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is the great leaders get to work. Coming up next on How Leaders Lead is Harris Barton. He’s the founder and managing director of H. Barton Asset Management and a three-time Super Bowl champion with the 49ers, playing alongside greats like Joe Montana and Jerry Rice and Steve Young.

You don’t have all the answers. I promise you.

JAMIE DIMON: You don’t have all this.

DAVID NOVAK: But there’s somebody out there that has a bunch of the answers. And you should start listening. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be.

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