Key Takeaways
- Jamie Dimon leads JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest bank by market value.
- During the Norges Bank Investment Management’s investment conference earlier this week, Dimon said that three things can kill a company: “bureaucracy, complacency and arrogance.”
- He said the solution is eliminating “jerks” who admire problems rather than solve them, and focus on following procedures instead of delivering results.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has had enough of managers who let bureaucracy — excessive red tape, overly complicated approval processes and rigid rules — thrive, calling the issue a quiet threat that slowly destroys organizations and creates problems.
“Bureaucracy, complacency and arrogance will take down a company,” Dimon said during the Norges Bank Investment Management’s investment conference earlier this week. “Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else.”
Dimon has led JPMorgan since 2006 and grown it from a $130 billion company into an $830 billion giant and the world’s largest bank by market value. He said that internal dysfunctions often determine whether a company survives or fails.
While bureaucracy tends to spread in massive organizations like JPMorgan, which employs over 300,000 people globally, Dimon noted it can just as easily take root in smaller companies or individual departments.
Dimon said the fix is to address the issue starting at the top by removing poor managers. In other words, “get rid of the jerks,” or those who prioritize following procedures over achieving results.
“They admire a problem,” Dimon said. “I say they’re like good bureaucrats. They like the process, not the outcome. Whereas I like the outcome.”
Canceling meetings and favoring small teams
One telltale sign of bureaucracy is when people withhold information, Dimon said. At JPMorgan, he ensures all relevant materials are shared with meeting participants in advance to prevent this. According to Dimon, keeping information from colleagues can create needless friction.
“If [information] isn’t shared properly, I generally just cancel the meeting,” Dimon said.
Even though he runs one of the world’s biggest banks, Dimon has always favored giving critical work to small, tightly focused teams. Tech companies have been moving toward flatter structures with fewer managers overseeing more employees — Meta’s applied engineering team, for example, reportedly operates with a 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratio. Dimon takes the opposite approach. He builds smaller teams because he believes they deliver stronger accountability and better results.
“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,” Dimon said.
Amazon is also cracking down on bureaucracy
Amazon has been fighting bureaucracy under CEO Andy Jassy, who took over in 2021 with the intention of turning the company into the “world’s largest startup.” In September 2024, Jassy announced plans to increase the ratio of employees to managers by at least 15% by early 2025, requiring managers to oversee at least eight direct reports instead of six.
Also in the same month, Amazon launched a “bureaucracy mailbox” email, which employees could use to report slow processes and unnecessary rules. In its first year, the tipline received over 1,500 complaints, leading to changes to 450 processes.
“I would say bureaucracy is really anathema to startups and to entrepreneurial organizations,” Jassy said at the company’s annual conference for third-party sellers in September 2025. “As you get larger, it’s really easy to accumulate bureaucracy, a lot of bureaucracy that you may not see.”
Key Takeaways
- Jamie Dimon leads JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest bank by market value.
- During the Norges Bank Investment Management’s investment conference earlier this week, Dimon said that three things can kill a company: “bureaucracy, complacency and arrogance.”
- He said the solution is eliminating “jerks” who admire problems rather than solve them, and focus on following procedures instead of delivering results.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has had enough of managers who let bureaucracy — excessive red tape, overly complicated approval processes and rigid rules — thrive, calling the issue a quiet threat that slowly destroys organizations and creates problems.
“Bureaucracy, complacency and arrogance will take down a company,” Dimon said during the Norges Bank Investment Management’s investment conference earlier this week. “Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else.”
Dimon has led JPMorgan since 2006 and grown it from a $130 billion company into an $830 billion giant and the world’s largest bank by market value. He said that internal dysfunctions often determine whether a company survives or fails.
