How JPMorgan’s newest board member thinks about risk and leadership

After departing her post as senior vice president of global customer fulfillment, a job she held through the rush of pandemic demand, she took over as CEO of Alto, a prescription delivery startup. The more obvious path for Boler Davis—who also spent nearly 25 years at GM, where she became the head of global manufacturing and labor relations—would have put her in the corner office at a Fortune 500 company. But she sought a different kind of challenge. “I wanted to do something more impactful and transformational,” she told Fortune.

Still, Boler Davis wields power at one of the world’s most influential companies: JPMorgan Chase, where she became an independent director last month. She spoke to Fortune about leading through the uncertainties of today’s global business environment and takeaways from Silicon Valley Bank’s failure. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Fortune: Why were you drawn to the JPMorgan board?

Davis: JPMorgan provides diverse financial services that impact many communities, businesses, and individuals. It believes in leveraging technology to improve services for customers, and it’s an innovative company. That aligned with me. The overall values of the company also aligned with my personal values. So I hope to bring my diverse background—and 30 years of experience in complex, regulated environments—to help JPMorgan as it moves forward.

What’s on your mind as you join the board?

Understanding what the risks are in the company and the macroeconomic risks. That’s where I’m spending time. How might some geopolitical risks impact the company? What are some of the worst-case scenarios? Do we have plans around that? 

You were a director at General Mills for three years before this. Does your board experience affect how you lead at Alto?  

It does. Once you have board experience, you think about what you should be doing from a governance perspective or risk perspective, and you understand audit. At General Mills, I was the chair of the corporate responsibility committee, so I think about that as well.  

What are your key challenges at Alto Pharmacy?

At Alto, the key for me is making sure we’re clear on our strategy, where we’re going to focus, and then being agile enough to make adjustments as needed. It’s also important that we communicate to our employees where we are, what’s going well, where we need to make changes, and that we see around corners. Employees are focused on their day-to-day. As leaders, we are responsible for discussing how we’re considering the risks that we see and those we don’t see.  

I’m using that word ‘risk’ a lot because I think that’s a big part of your job as a CEO, to understand and mitigate the macro and internal risks.

How do you prepare for risks that you don’t see?

SVB was our bank. So far, we have not had any significant impact and we don’t anticipate having any, but it was very, very scary for a while. Once you see an event like SVB’s failure, that should inform your risk framework. It’s just like the pandemic: I don’t think anyone saw it coming, but you learn from that. You see other risks that you hadn’t captured before. 

First, you have to have a framework to start with because if you’re not aware of and managing through the risks you know, it’s going to be so much harder when unexpected things happen.

Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com
@lilamaclellan

Noted

“Boards of directors have a duty to be independent, possess moral authority and understand the business they oversee…Regulators, whose role is to ensure the safety and soundness of the banking system, should exercise their authority to remove directors who lack these three traits, just as regulators who are asleep at the switch should be held accountable.”

—Donald Powell, former chair of the FDIC, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal about Silicon Valley Bank

On the Agenda

👓 Read: The FTC made history recently when it fined a supplement maker for manipulating customer reviews by attaching glowing comments about one product to another. It’s the first time the agency has taken action against “review hijacking.”  

🎥 Watch: Bloomberg’s latest episode of Getting Warmer goes to the U.K. and examines how targeted litigation by grassroots organizations is forcing large companies to respect climate goals. 

📖 Bookmark: Fortune’s crypto team ranked the 40 most important blockchain companies, including “TradFi” firms like PayPal and Visa.

In Brief

- Court filings show that JPMorgan compliance officials tried to warn the bank about the late Jeffrey Epstein’s predatory behavior several years before Epstein, a client, was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution.

- A version of the epic power struggle that pushed the late Michel David-Weill out of his family’s private equity firm, Lazard, years ago is playing out in Europe, this time involving heirs who were sidelined in a boardroom battle.

- The CEOs who recently led some U.S. banks to failure should “go back to living like a person that works on the production line of Ford,” says billionaire Warren Buffett. He wants to see executives like Greg Becker, former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, return their plum salaries and pensions.

- On Planet Money, Campbell Harvey, the economist who discovered the inverted yield curve as an early indicator of an impending recession, shared three reasons his invention may be flashing a false warning.

Editor’s Pick 

Outsiders aren’t sure what to make of Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, the Chinese-Canadian cofounder and CEO of Binance. In interviews, he often comes off as a soft-spoken man of the people, but he’s also been cast as a “sharp-elbowed,” dangerously ambitious leader who built his fortune through some questionable practices, Fortune’s crypto editor Jeff Roberts and former Fortune writer Yvonne Lau report in this fascinating new profile. Through interviews with CZ and major figures in his life, they explore the cultural, familial, and economic forces that shaped the crypto baron.

Here’s a snippet:

“In Vancouver, while his mother worked sewing jobs and his father drove a decrepit Datsun, Zhao often got lifts in the BMWs of his friends’ parents to and from volleyball games, where he was team captain. The only splurge he recalls was his dad spending $7,000 Canadian dollars—a staggering sum at the time—for an IBM-compatible 286 computer, which the senior Zhao used for his research but also to teach his son how to program. If you want to squint at Zhao’s early life for clues he would become a billionaire, this could be one. The time he spent learning coding from a parent, whom others have described as a genius, was likely indispensable in Zhao’s later life, when he built the technology that would power Binance. ‘My father,’ Zhao says, ‘is a mentor on the technical side.’”

Read the rest here, and have a great weekend.