Jamie Dimon might run America’s largest bank, but he’s focused on assigning the firm’s biggest competitive battles to small teams.
In his annual letter to shareholders, Dimon, who has been JPMorgan’s CEO since 2006, shared a range of management lessons he’s learned, from organizing effective teams to creating company culture.
Though JPMorgan employs some 320,000 people, Dimon said said that “the real competitive battles” are waged by small, laser-focused teams. The idea, he explained, is that competitions are won in narrow, highly specific arenas — whether that’s a particular segment of investment banking, a type of client, or a product feature.
Each team needs total buy-in from its members to create the desired “super speed” and keep JPMorgan ahead of competitors.
“The teams needed to tackle these challenges should be small and authorized with the decision-making ability to move and act like Navy SEALs or the Army’s Delta Force,” Dimon wrote. The CEO likened the team effort to “trench warfare” and, true to form, said it’s key to break through bureaucracy.
Dimon isn’t alone in his small team advocacy — some modern startups are scaling with just a handful of employees, often with the help of AI. Meta has also been reorganizing around small teams, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg said might be the “optimal configuration for driving frontier research” on an earnings call last year.
For all of his praise for small units, Dimon said companies need some enterprise-wide platforms, whether for AI, data, or financial systems. These scaled, reusable platforms shouldn’t create bureaucratic hurdles; instead, they should be “highly efficient.” People also need to be connected across the enterprise, Dimon said, and “perform like a well-functioning sports team.”
As Dimon integrates AI into the bank, the roles on that metaphorical team will likely change. He said in the 46-page letter that AI will eliminate some jobs and create others, and that JPMorgan “will have definitive plans on how we can support and redeploy our affected workforce.”
Dimon isn’t one to mince words when it comes to cultivating JPMorgan’s culture, saying last summer that improving the workplace often means “fire the assholes.” He’s also a strong advocate for in-office work, spearheading Wall Street’s RTO mandates and saying at a conference last month that work-from-home “doesn’t work” for many younger workers.