“This Will TAKE DOWN Your Business” - Jamie Dimon CALLS OUT Managers Killing Companies

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Jamie Diamond comes out and says the following. He says uh uh he wants companies to get Rob. Is this a clip of what he says?

[00:00:08]>> Yes, sir.

[00:00:09]>> Okay. So, here's what he has to say about companies to get rid of managers who do not do this. Go ahead.

[00:00:15]>> I really believe this. Bureaucracy complacency and arrogance will take down a company. Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else.

[00:00:24]And there are and by you could be a small company and have it. You could be a big company and have it. You can have it in your branch, you can not have in the other branch and it's always the the manager stupid. I mean almost always uh the way you fight it is with with me all the information is shared beforehand. So you know there's no one's secret. I remember going to companies and you know this wouldn't share with that part of the company. If it isn't shared properly I can't I generally just cancel the meeting. You know if someone comes in and says you know Nikolai wants X and I don't believe that's right. I say well why did you wait for this meeting to do that? Go talk to him. uh um every everything no matter how small get on the road. go see clients and clients are a gift because you know look they're they're demanding they should be but they also tell you you know in our case what our competitors are doing better why we didn't get something what you know if we don't do this in that country you're not going to give us a big piece of business because how important it is for you and I uniquely know it might cost $30 million to build a payment system took up to a country but you know it's easy to say well we're going to do it now I just found out why you know the staff isn't doing it so uh when you have a meeting people often don't know who's running it. That's a mistake. Uh when you have a meeting and someone ends the meeting by saying, "That was a great meeting. We'll pick it up again next week." It's usually a bad meeting. The meeting should end with, "Okay, David, you're going to do X. Talk to these people." Not hierarchical. It's just you could, you know, who cut across the company. You talked to HR. You know, consumers got the most people. This change in their program is going to affect, you know, their branches. Talk about come back, make a recommendation.

[00:01:57]>> I always have a lot of thoughts on this.

[00:01:58]I have a lot of thoughts on this. Tom, I'll come to you first. Go for it. Well, I I love Jamie Diamond and I love this.

[00:02:03]This is sort of the onstage mellow version of Jamie. There's the famous bootleg recording of him, you know, flipping out on return to work and Zoom meetings and you're not paying attention and you're on your phone. This is the common sense, Jamie. And my favorite part of what he just said, my favorite part is clients are a gift. They tell you not clients are a gift because they run your business. Not clients are a gift, they bring you revenue. Not clients are a gift because, you know, they they they give you some sort of ratification. No, he said they're a gift because they tell you where you didn't win. They tell you what the competitor's doing. And this says that this guy's in touch. And he says, "Get on the road.

[00:02:44]Get out. Get on the road." Guess what?

[00:02:47]Work from home doesn't do that. AI doesn't do that. It's get out. And I I love this. And by the way, if you've never se don't search for it now, wait till the end of the podcast, but go find the bootleg tape of Return to Office and Jamie Diamond and paying attention. It's a little bit of profanity in there, but it is a great lesson in leadership.

[00:03:06]>> Jeff, I mean, it's kind of rich coming from a top banker because next to maybe the Department of Motor Vehicles, banks are just famous bureaucracies um that they're built on bureaucracy for a lot of good legitimate reasons. So maybe you take it as, you know, Jaime Diamond now saying that bureaucracy is bad or at least it's a hindrance to um operating a bank in the way that needs to be operated. You have to wonder does something change because over the last 20 years the banking system in particular, the banking sector in particular has gone, you know, 2010s in particular became more and more bureaucratic. So maybe they're starting to loosen the reigns a little bit understanding that it is it is um trying to micromanage everything has held them back over the last you know really since 2008. Um the banking sector changed dramatically uh in 2008. Before then it was sort of like what he was talking about you know where people just did things. Um you got together in small meetings we have a common common task to perform. We figure out who's going to do what and then we move on and do it.

[00:04:05]After 2008, for understandable reasons, there were just layers and layers of management, bureaucracy, committees, and everything else. So, you wonder if maybe the tide is shifting a little bit in the banking sector where it's starting to loosen up and maybe being loosened up because he can see that there's a competition element to it. What you're talking about with the customers, what are we doing wrong? And the customers these days are not just other banks. The cartel is breaking down because for the longest time, money flow, money intermediation, and credit was just especially the largest banks. they got bigger, bigger, bigger, smaller number of them. Now you've got hedge funds, you've got private credit, um you've got shadow banks, you've got decentralized finance. Seeing that down the road, he's got to compete with a whole whole bunch of different people. So I wonder if he starts to see the writing on the wall here that this is this is a this is a big deal.

[00:04:51]>> I think I think also listen, no matter what when Jamie talks, people listen because it's Jamie Diamond. So he carries that weight and and he's run the biggest bank with 318,000 employees, just 65,000 engineers. Engineers alone, they have 65,000 of us. Imagine how many engineers you have in your company. They got 65,000 engineers working for Chase.

[00:05:08]So massive behemoth. I think they transact around 7 to10 trillion a day is what they do. 7 trillion dollars a day.

[00:05:17]But here's a part of it when I'm listening to Jamie Tom. You know what I think about Tom? I'm thinking he's in the legacy mode because as time's coming up and he's moving on and he wants he he has probably he's probably coming out of a meeting or a conference call cuz sometimes when you're being interviewed what people don't realize is >> you're you're going to give the answer of whatever experience is fresh in your mind of what happened last 24 hours generally last 6 hours. I don't know if that makes sense. So you just came from a crisis or something you had to overcome or a dumb meeting or something that happened. So you're really talking about that meeting than what was on your mind pre that meeting taking place. I'm going to talk about these three things.

[00:05:54]Boom. You shift. You're talking about this experience. I will tell you a couple things though when you're talking about this is when you're smaller and you're coming up, if you don't get ahead and control the manipulation, the gamification, and you don't teach people to deal direct, it's going to be harder for you to fix it when the company gets bigger. It's got to be addressed when the company is small. had a call the other day with a guy. He says, uh, one of our clients, he says, "I've had this person with my company for nine years.

[00:06:23]She's been here from day one." And you can tell he's nervous talking about her because he needs to fire her, but he doesn't know how to fire her because his COO is sitting right next to him explaining what this girl is doing and how much chaos this person has created in this construction company.

[00:06:42]And I said, "Does she know your expectation of how she needs to be in a company? Do you get what do you mean by that? How clear are you about what things you're not willing to tolerate?

[00:06:53]Or do you avoid the conflict?" There's a great book out there called Five Temptations of a CEO if you've never read it. I mean, I don't know how many thousands of copies I've sold for this guy, Patrick Mansion.

[00:07:02]>> If you're a CEO, do yourself a favor and go buy this book, Five Temptations of a CEO. You'll see you're dealing with one of these five temptations. and was he was Rob, can you pull up what the five temptations are on on a just on an article? Yeah, just type in what are the five temptations and he breaks it down.

[00:07:17]Go to images that come up right there.

[00:07:19]Status over results. Okay. Oh my god, my status. Let me tell you how important I am, right? Focused on career development. And we have that in our company as well. We have it everywhere.

[00:07:27]Popularity over accountability. I want to be liked. I want people to like me.

[00:07:31]Certainty over clarity, right? And then harmony over productive conflict. You need conflict. And last but not least, invulnerability over trust. Like, hey, every once in a while, we have to, you know, be willing to talk about areas that we need to improve to to develop trust. And then if you don't do that, what ends up happening is triangulation.

[00:07:50]Departments compete with departments and they find ways to throw them under the bus and they'll say, "Well, let me tell you, that guy got a higher score and this guy got a this and that guy got a this versus guys, cut it out.

[00:08:00]Everybody's got to get better." One of the things we did the last two years because I hate company conflicts, corporate, I hate the politics, I cannot stand it. And sometimes when you bring people that have never worked in startups, they don't know anything different. All they know is core. We had a a guy that used to work with us many years ago. He was one of our seuite executives who managed the finances. I won't get any more specific than this, but I remember I was sizing up a handful of our guys to see who was going to replace me to be the president. And I held a meeting one time and I went to Dallas and one by one by one I asked everybody. I said, "Who do you think should replace me and be the president?"

[00:08:39]And I was kind of wa watching to see what people were going to say and who was going to be recognizing themselves and I think it's got to be me and I think it's got to be him and I think it's got to be this and I think it's got to be there. And I said, "Who do you not think is ready to be a president?" And one of them kept targeting one person and that one person was moral.

[00:09:00]>> Okay? Because to me, she was the one that wanted the job, was willing to do the job and she was hardworking and I trusted her. And so when the decision was made, the other guy went and one by one by one, I kept seeing people being in his office.

[00:09:18]Hey, let's do oneonone. And he's doing one-on- ones with all these people in his office. Like why are you doing all these one-on- ones in your office? And it's one-on- ones.

[00:09:26]>> It's not like uh them and the manager.

[00:09:28]So imagine like let's just say Tom reports to Jeff.

[00:09:31]>> Yeah.

[00:09:31]>> But I don't have a meeting with Jeff.

[00:09:33]I'm just having a meeting with Tom and I said, "Hey, we're hearing that Jeff is doing XYZ. Have you had that experience?" Well, I heard it from somebody as well. Oh, really? Tell me more. Tell me more. And then they go into this mode.

[00:09:46]>> And then I'm like, "Hey, are you doing this?" "No, they're coming to me. So you're not setting it up." No. Handful of the employee came and said, "Is there a reason why this guy keeps calling us into the office to have these types of meetings?" I said, "So he is prompting him." Yes, but that he's not HR, but he's pro. Yes. Why is he getting ahead of it and undermining morale >> collecting information? He's going to drip out later.

[00:10:08]>> Let let me tell you, it was so disruptive. So what he's talking about caused us to create higher metrics. We created higher metrics on a calibration that we do for every single one of our employees based on five different metrics that we go through.

[00:10:24]And we score 100% of our employees every quarter based on these five metrics.

[00:10:29]Effort, attitude, leadership, innovation, and results. And then quarterly, we also send a 10 questionnaire to every manager and every employee in the company. You know what the questionnaire is about? It's about how well of a job is your manager doing with career planning. How well of a job is a manager doing talking to you about what your long-term plan is going to be five, ten years from now. And they score it and it comes out and managers get a score and departments get a score and business units get a score. So now we sit there and we're like, wait a minute, you don't spend a lot of time to career planning with your guys. So then the managers when this questionnaire went out, guess what the managers are saying?

[00:11:06]>> Oh >> I better start talking to you about your career, Jeff. Hey, I care about your career. What do you want to do long term here? Right? And then employees are like, "Oh, this is the first time this guy's ever come to me and ask me about."

[00:11:17]So, everybody was, and by the way, if you're if you're a small business owner wanting to find out this software we have, it's a SAS software that a lot of our uh small business owners are taking advantage, go to the bottom of it, fill out your information at hirmetrics.com.

[00:11:30]hiremetrics.com. Most people don't even know we've been running this business, changing a lot of people's lives with their companies to get it more efficient. You get more out of your employees. It eliminates politics.

[00:11:39]People know when to get a promotion.

[00:11:41]People know when they're going to get a raise. People know what to expect.

[00:11:43]People know the recognition. It becomes very clear and very honest. So, I love the fact that Jamie said this. I thought it was a great point he made. And I hope more smaller business owners get ahead of it instead of being afraid of having this type of a conversation. So, those of you guys that did the survey, we originally thought because it's a lot of questions. It was 27 of them. We said we're going to give a $25 gift card. So, we sat with finance and we said, "Guys, it's not like it's going to be that many anyways." We said, "Let's put a budget of $25 to $50,000 for these $25 gift cards."

[00:12:16]>> Well, the report comes out this morning >> from our digital marketing team. $11,976 of you did the survey.

[00:12:26]>> Wow.

[00:12:26]>> Which is going to cost us $29ome,000 for this gift card. And a lot of you guys were tweeting saying, "Am I gonna get the gift card?" If you completed the survey, you check your email. Today at nine o'clock, they started sending all the gift cards from Shopify to go to vtmerch.com.

[00:12:46]And so check your email. If it hasn't, just remember it's 12,000 people. So all of a sudden, it was put in the system.

[00:12:54]You're probably g if you haven't already gotten it. If you check your mail, you uh uh you will check your email. you will in the next uh 15, 30 minutes, 1 hour. But go to vtmerch.com. That $25 is a straightup gift card. Buy whatever you want. We have a lot of good things that people don't look at. There's some unique accessories that we have you can go look into. Uh yesterday we had an event at our cigar lounge. We have this value tamement cigar set with cutters, lighters.

[00:13:19]There's so many great gifts that you can give somebody. But uh you have your $25 gift card to use. And by the way, for those of you guys that are watching saying I but it is so revealing the report that came back, FYI, just so everybody knows, nobody knows what the results were. Tom doesn't even know the results. It's driving him insane, >> but I get teased a lot.

[00:13:39]>> Yeah, Brandon this morning's like, "Come on, tell me where am I?" And him and Hu are getting to Hberto's holding people hostage. I don't like what he's doing, but he loves it. He loves this kind of stuff. If you want to see what the report results were, we may make a one-pager, two-pager to kind of share with the audience. If you text the word PBD to 310341132, again, text the word PBD to 310341132, that report will be sent out to the audience. Our YouTube guy called and says, "Wait, you guys did a survey on your audience to ask what they didn't like and did like." Yes, we did. Nobody does this. And you gave away $25 gift card. How many people you spent $300,000? Said, "Well, we weren't expecting $300,000, but we're it's already too late." So, there you have it. So, everybody that completed it, I want to say thank you uh on behalf of the team. This is great intel for us on finding ways to uh improve the product that we have here. And without your feedback, we're going to read every single one of the pieces of feedback.

[00:14:38]And some of you guys may even get a call from us. So, again, text PBD to 310341132.

[00:14:44]We may send a video a a report to you guys specifically in a text once we have that report. And um some people are not going to like it, but it is what it is.

[00:14:53]The report was very good for all of us.

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