JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, leading a $4.5 trillion giant, bypasses his staff to read customer complaints personally.
Why? To escape the filter.
“The bureaucracy does want to control you, so you’ve got to kill the bureaucracy.”
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Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, at the helm of a $4.5 trillion giant, has declared a personal war against one of the greatest adversaries of leadership: the bureaucracy ‘filtered’ by his own staff.
Staying Connected to Reality: The Crux of Customer Complaints
The CEO of the bank with 300,000 employees shared a habit at the America Business Forum in Miami that keeps his bridge to reality alive: reading customer complaints himself. This is not merely an operational control mechanism; it is an act of holding up a corporate mirror.
Dimon’s sharp observation is: “I still read customer complaints. If they ask you a question, you’ve got to respond to me directly and not go up that chain of command. The chain of command starts to edit it and fine-tune it.” In this process, critical information is subjected to a kind of institutional self-censorship before reaching the leadership layer.
The Death of Bureaucracy: The Leader’s Constant Fight
For Dimon, bureaucracy is a “reflex” that subtly creeps into any large institution, insulating leaders from reality. This is a battle that leaders must constantly wage:
“The bureaucracy does want to control you, so you’ve got to kill the bureaucracy. If you’re in a position like mine, you’ve got to break down those barriers all the time.”
Bureaucracy evokes the metaphor of a “corporate clot” slowly circulating in the veins of a massive institution. This clot kills a company’s ability to think and leads to internal complacency. Dimon argues that once a leader’s mind closes, making progress becomes impossible.
The Leadership Compass: Constant Curiosity and Gemba Walks
Against bureaucracy, Dimon advocates for the principle of constant curiosity and a hands-on (Gemba Walk) approach. He doesn’t just read five newspapers every morning; he still takes time to visit branches with his management team.
“Get on the bus and go to a branch. Talk to people. You’ll learn something: something stupid we do, something that doesn’t work, or something they did better at another bank.“
These branch visits are, as Dimon puts it, a ritual of “staying grounded.” It means “breathing the atmosphere” of a firm with 300,000 employees across 60 countries.
Culture and Communication: The Power of Action
Dimon emphasizes that culture is what prevents a company from collapsing under its own weight. This is not about written memos; it’s about the power of actions.
“People don’t believe what you write in memos, they believe what you do. They see you fire bad people or a client who mistreats employees. That’s how they know you mean it.“
He has also learned the value of plainspoken communication. Every message from his office is now written in his own voice, stripped of what he calls “corporate pablum.” This means a leader’s words, like a sharp sword, are delivered directly to the target.
Two Critical Business Recommendations
New York Business Leadership Center (High-Impact Leadership Research Center) Recommendation
Leaders should view organizational hierarchy as a dam that slows down information flow and actively establish “red lines” (direct lines) that bypass this structure.
As in Jamie Dimon’s case, a leader’s direct access to the most sensitive and unfiltered data (customer complaints) is key to eliminating the risk of Strategic Blindness.
Hillier Consulting (Corporate Efficiency and Transformation) Recommendation
Institute a periodic practice within the organization called the “Bureaucracy Hunt.” This should be a mechanism that allows employees to anonymously report processes that waste their time, add no value to output, and are solely aimed at hierarchical control.
This hunt will translate Dimon’s call to “kill bureaucracy” into a concrete and actionable operation.
Would you like me to elaborate on the concept of the “Bureaucracy Hunt” or provide examples of “corporate pablum”?
