10 Powerful Lessons from JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon— What His Most Recent Shareholder Letter Teaches Us
- Gregg Metcalf
- Nov 12
- 6 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
While self-help and business books line the shelves promising formulas for success — and most shareholder letters are crafted to fit the carefully curated, monitored image of a company — Jamie Dimon’s letters are different. They’re direct, unfiltered, and powerful leadership in real time. He breaks the latest “PC rules” and writes from the heart.
Sharing with the kind of transparency most people only hear from a CEO of his stature if they’re a trusted confidant, Dimon closes his most recent letter to sharholders with a section titled “Management Learnings.” He shares what goes wrong in leadership, in organizations, and in himself — breaking it down into ten points.
1. Why Complacency, Arrogance, Bureaucracy, and BS Kill Companies
“I’ve said speed kills — but I mean slow speed,” Dimon writes before naming names: Sears, Kmart, Blackberry, Lehman Brothers. Once-great companies that didn’t die from competition but from comfort.
Complacency, he says, is arrogance in disguise. It’s what happens when leaders stop listening, systems stop adapting, and politics replace performance.
His reminder is simple: if you’re not moving forward, you’re already falling behind.
2. You Have to Get the Numbers Right
Inside JPMorgan, Dimon found billions in costs buried in the wrong divisions — not through deceit but through complacency.
“I’m a fanatic about proper accounting,” he writes. “Accounting can lead you to the wrong answer. Regulatory rules can lead you to the wrong answer. Or your own echo chamber can steer you the wrong way. Still, you need to know your numbers: get them right, understand them, analyze them, test them, and don’t be rote about it.”
He learned to test every assumption and look at numbers himself — not just the summaries.“Trust but verify” isn’t just a phrase; it’s survival. You can’t fix what you won’t face.
3. You Need a Full and Constant Assessment
Curiosity, Dimon says, is the antidote to arrogance. “We can learn so much from our competitors, customers, and employees if we only open our eyes and ears.”
He sent teams to study companies like Alibaba, Ping An, and Tencent — not to copy them, but to understand agility. “Get out of your own echo chamber,” he says. “Hit the road, leave your office, talk with everyone you can — be constantly learning and assessing.”
Leaders who never stop learning lead teams that never stop improving.
4. You Better Have Great Controls
Controls don’t kill creativity — they protect it.
Dimon tells of a $2 million copier purchased by one team while another bought the same model for $50,000 from a bankruptcy sale. The problem wasn’t the copier; it was awareness.
The lesson: know where the money goes, and make sure everyone else does too.
5. You Must Kill Bureaucracy All the Time and Relentlessly
“One of the biggest things that can kill a company — or make it slow to adjust or admit problems — is bureaucracy,” Dimon writes.
He recalls discovering broken ATMs that staff insisted were fine — until he sent someone to check. They weren’t.
He cut policies, simplified systems, and removed layers that slowed decisions.“It’s important for leadership to always question what their company does and why,” he says. “And the answer cannot be, ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it.’”
Bureaucracy doesn’t announce itself; it creeps in — one policy, one meeting, one unnecessary step at a time.
“Here’s another example of what slows us down,” he adds. “Meetings. Kill meetings. But when they do happen, they have to start on time and end on time — and someone’s got to lead them. There should be a purpose to every meeting and always a follow-up list.”
And finally: “Shine light on a problem or disagreement. Be transparent with your colleagues.”
6. Mistakes I Made
“I recognize that I don’t always get everything right,” Dimon admits, “and that I have made plenty of mistakes myself — that’s why I want to candidly share some of them as lessons.”
He confesses to underestimating technology, keeping people too long, and missing early warning signs.
When JPMorgan suffered massive trading losses during the ‘London Whale’ incident, he called it a huge embarrassment — and took the blame himself for not seeing it sooner.
He also recalls realizing that Bank One’s branches opened later than competitors’, hurting morale. His fix? Open earlier.
Leadership, he says, is about owning the problem.
7. What the Heck Is Culture?
“Culture is what you do, not what you say.”
He adds: “Recognition says someone did something that you didn’t — that they taught you something. I was never particularly good at recognition, but I’ve learned lessons from watching Ted Lasso and David Novak, former CEO of Yum! Brands. Recognition is a form of humility and acknowledgment."
Organizations build great culture by recognizing people’s actions day in and day out — not by serving up platitudes.
Dimon defines culture with actions, not slogans. He fired a wealthy client who mistreated employees.He reinstated benefits for security guards after realizing a cost cut had hurt the wrong people.
“Creating a good culture is possible only if everyone understands a company’s purpose,” he says. “Our purpose is to lift up society — to help people. That’s an enormous responsibility.”
8. Leading the Team
Dimon believes in facing problems head-on — what he calls “putting the dead cats on the table.” That means saying what others won’t and inviting people to disagree.
“Loyalty is earned,” he says, “when people receive full input and know that they’ve had a chance to offer theirs.”
He rejects the phrase 'stay in your lane.' Teams thrive when everyone feels accountable for the whole, not just their part.
And amid the toughness, he reminds leaders to stay human — to keep work grounded in respect and humor.
9. Why It’s Hard to Achieve Good Growth and Innovate
“You can kill innovation with too many resources, too few resources, or bureaucracy,” Dimon warns.
“You’ve got to really think through what you’re trying to accomplish.”
He describes the painful but necessary consolidation of seven loan systems, five deposit systems, and twenty-five general ledgers — the kind of hard work that builds resilience.
“You just do the tough stuff,” he says. “Over time, you make the company better at it. Transformation is a constant effort to improve.”
Failure happens, he says, for three reasons: too much process, too little focus, or too much fear.
10. Management Tricks and Tools
“While leaders should celebrate successes,” Dimon says, “it’s still important to emphasize the negatives and focus on continuous improvement. Be a skeptic but not a cynic. Utilize management techniques that work.”
He closes with a list of practical disciplines:
Be responsive.
Treat everyone with respect.
Be direct and honest (that’s respect).
Celebrate successes.
Focus on continuous improvement.
Write memos yourself.
Respond to people directly.
Share all the facts — don’t hoard them.
Always make follow-up lists.
Avoid jargon; speak the way you talk.
If a meeting is required, make it count.
Work smarter, not longer.
Make work fun.
Take care of yourself.
Always ask: “What would you do if you were queen or king for a day?”
These tricks are disciplines that become habits. Over time, habits define people — and people define organizations.”
The Bottom Line
Dimon’s letter is more than a shareholder update. It’s a blueprint for how great companies stay alive.
He reminds us that leadership isn’t found in process or politics. It’s built through candor, consistency, and care.
The environment leaders create — physical, operational, and cultural — will either provide the foundation to flounder or to flourish.
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