JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is fed up with managers who enable bureaucracy, which he considers a silent killer for organizations that brings with it a host of other problems.
“Bureaucracy, complacency, and arrogance will take down a company,” he said during the Norges Bank Investment Management’s investment conference Tuesday. “Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else.”
The longtime CEO, who helped build JPMorgan into a $830 billion behemoth and the world’s largest bank by market cap from a $130 billion market cap when his tenure started in 2006, said these internal issues are often the biggest factors in deciding whether a company lives or dies. Bureaucracy can often fester in large companies like JPMorgan, which has more than 300,000 employees globally, but it can also plague small organizations or even smaller parts of a large organization, said Dimon.
The solution, he said, is to tackle the problem from the top down and “get rid of the jerks,” or the bureaucratic managers that focus more on the process than the outcome.
“They admire a problem. I say they’re like good bureaucrats,” he said. “They like the process, not the outcome. Whereas I like the outcome.”
Dimon set his crosshairs on self-congratulating “super presentations,” that laud areas the company is doing well in. In contrast, Dimon said he likes to point out where other companies are doing better. Instead of reveling in the fact that JPMorgan is the biggest FX trader in the world, he wants employees to wonder why the company is the seventh-biggest FX trader in Vietnam.
A clear sign of bureaucracy is withholding information, noted Dimon. The CEO has previously made clear his disdain for “rope-a-dope” politics—using the Muhammad Ali boxing tactic of tiring out your opponent so they can’t follow up. Workplace bureaucracy, he argued, fosters that tiresome back and forth. To avoid this at JPMorgan, any relevant information for a meeting is dispersed to every participant beforehand. Withheld information can breed unnecessary conflict, he added.
“If [information] isn’t shared properly, I generally just cancel the meeting,” he said.
Despite leading one of the biggest banks in the world, Dimon has always been keen on assigning the most important work to small groups, which he likened as having the focus of Navy SEALs. In tech, companies have increasingly moved to flatten leadership structures and put more workers under a single manager—including Meta, which reportedly has a 50-to-1 employee to manager ratio on its applied engineering team.
Dimon, though, prefers the opposite approach, creating smaller teams which have better accountability.
“Get the people in the room and work it out. Don’t allow it to go back and forth with groups for six months or nine months or a year,” he said.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy approaches bureaucracy similarly to Dimon. Since taking the top job at the No. 1 company on the Fortune 500, Jassy has worked to foster productive disagreements among employees to reach the best outcomes. In his 2024 shareholder letter, Jassy said the best leaders don’t shy away from being challenged—rather when it happens, “they’re intrigued.” To battle inefficiency, the CEO launched a “bureaucracy mailbox” where employees can flag unnecessary red tape, which he claimed led to 375 improvements.
When it comes to his own leadership, Dimon said he doesn’t expect his employees to take his word blindly. In board meetings, partly because of his “forceful” personality, the CEO has learned to leave the room for a period so board members can argue among themselves about company issues without interference, and give him feedback.
Ultimately, what creates a non-bureaucratic workplace is how employees see the boss leading by example, said Dimon.
“I have to earn my trust and respect every day, too. It isn’t like I walk in a room and somehow you have to trust me. You don’t. You’re going to be watching closely—what does the boss do, what does he say, does he really mean it, does he follow up.”
