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What Kills a Company
In Jamie Dimon’s annual letter to shareholders this week, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co. shared his remarks from a recent master class he led for the company’s leaders.
“Leadership should always be about learning and questioning,” he wrote. “Our company needs to nurture innovation, ambition and discipline while discouraging complacency, arrogance and bureaucracy” — which “kill companies.”
Complacency is particularly pernicious, leading to dishonesty, poor incentives, unethical behavior or just being slow to adapt to marketplace shifts. That had Dimon tasking bank leaders to look for signs of complacency at JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the U.S. He asked the 400 executives who attended the master class to email him personally with their ideas to make the company better. “I’m going to ask each and every one of you, personally — and I'm going to track it — to send me an email,” he said. “[H]ave a little fun thinking about the stupid stuff we do, the bureaucratic stuff we do — about things you would change if you were able to change them.”
Boards can root out complacency, too. It’s a cousin to hubris, one of seven signs of poor governance I identified in the first quarter 2025 issue of Bank Director magazine. Say a bank performs well for years. A board member may think, “Why fix what isn’t broken?”
Instead, a board member could ask, “What happens when the operating environment shifts?” Silicon Valley Bank failed in 2023 after a rapid rise in interest rates. Scores of banks and mortgage lenders collapsed in the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Booms and busts in oil, agriculture and commercial real estate led to banking crises in the 1980s.
The U.S. economy appears to be entering another tumultuous period. In an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday, Dimon said a recession could be a “likely outcome” due to the current trade spat. Companies and consumers could cut back on spending, leading to softer loan demand and credit issues.
“We always run the company so we can serve people in good times and bad times,” Dimon told Fox Business. His advice for America? “We should get our own act together.”
• Emily McCormick, vice president of editorial & research for Bank Director
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