Jamie Dimon says bureaucracy sinks companies and the solution may be getting rid of the ‘jerks’ who don’t want to solve it

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is fed up with managers who enable bureaucracy, which he considers a silent killer for organizations that brings with it a host of other problems. “Bureaucracy, complacency, and arrogance will take down a company,” he said during the Norges Bank Investment Management’s investment conference Tuesday. “Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else.” The longtime CEO, who helped build JPMorgan into a $830 billion behemoth and the world’s largest bank by market cap from a $130 billion market cap when his tenure started in 2006, said these internal issues are often the biggest factors in deciding whether a company lives or dies. Bureaucracy can often fester in large companies like JPMorgan, which has more than 300,000 employees globally, but it can also plague small organizations or even smaller parts of a large organization, said Dimon. The solution, he said, is to tackle the problem from the top down and “get rid of the jerks,” or the bureaucratic managers that focus more on the process than the outcome. “They admire a problem. I say they’re like good bureaucrats,” he said. “They like the process, not the outcome. Whereas I like the outcome.” Dimon set his crosshairs on self-congratulating “super presentations,” that laud areas the company is doing well in. In contrast, Dimon said he likes to point out where other companies are doing better. Instead of reveling in the fact that JPMorgan is the biggest FX trader in the world, he wants employees to wonder why the company is the seventh-biggest FX trader in Vietnam. A clear sign of bureaucracy is withholding information, noted Dimon. The CEO has previously made clear his disdain for “rope-a-dope” politics—using the Mohammad Ali boxing tactic of tiring out your opponent so they can’t follow up. Workplace bureaucracy, he argued, fosters that tiresome back and forth. To avoid this at JPMorgan, any relevant information for a meeting is dispersed to every participant beforeha