Jamie Dimon may sound like a prominent HR lady, but he’s not. He’s the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and he certainly didn’t mince words at a recent town hall, where he bluntly dismissed a petition signed by over 1,000 employees advocating for hybrid work.
His response: “Don’t waste time on it. I don’t care how many people sign that fucking petition,” was captured on tape and later released by multiple news outlets.
Here’s the transcript:
“A lot of you were on the fucking Zoom, doing the following. Okay? Looking at your mail, sending texts about what an asshole the other person is. Okay? Not paying attention, not reading your stuff. And if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, and creates rudeness—it does. Okay? And when I found out that people are doing that—you don’t do that at my goddamn meetings. You go to a meeting with me, you got my attention, you got my focus. I don’t bring my goddamn phone. I’m not sending texts to people, okay? It simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for creativity. It slows down decision-making. And don’t give me the shit that work-from-home Friday works. I call a lot of people on Friday. There’s not a goddamn person to get a hold of. But here are the problems, okay?
And they are substantial. The young generation is being damaged by this. They may or may not be on your particular staff, but they are being left behind socially, ideawise, meeting people. In fact, my guess is most of you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room. Every area should be looking to be 10% more efficient. If I was ready to park a hundred people, I guarantee you if I wanted to, I could run it with 90 and be more efficient. I guarantee you I could do it in my sleep. And the notion, these bureaucracies, I need more people, I can’t get it done. No, because you’re filling requests that don’t need to be done. Your people are going to meetings they don’t need to go to. Someone told me to approve something as wealth management, that they had to go to 14 committees.
I am dying to get the name of the 14 committees, and I feel like firing 14 chairmen of committees. I can’t stand it anymore. Now you have a choice. You don’t have to work at JP Morgan. So those of you who don’t want to work at the company, that’s fine with me. I’m not mad at you. Don’t be mad at me. It’s a free country. You can walk with your feet. But this company’s going to set our own standards and do it our own way. And I’ve had it with this kind of stuff, and I’ve been working seven days a goddamn week since Covid. And I come in and where’s everybody else, but they’re here and there. And the zooms and the zooms don’t show up. And people say they didn’t get stuff. So that’s not how you run a great company. We didn’t build this great company by doing that, by doing the same semi-diseased shit that everybody else does.”
I have to tell you something. I agree with him.
A lot of people do not pay attention during meetings. I’ve seen it myself as a consultant and speaker. People are backchanneling and sending texts. They are focused on other things. And it makes me feel like an asshole for showing up prepared with a message. It’s like, listen, we all want to be on vacation. But if I have to be here, why don’t you have to show up? Is your time worth more than mine? Turning off your screen and zoning out while I show up is profoundly disrespectful. Now, I’m not sure we have to kill work-from-home policies, but we should explore when we meet, how we meet, and why we meet. And we also need to teach people some goddamn manners across all generations.
The younger generation is being left behind. We don’t grow in isolation, and I worry that a younger generation of workers doesn’t understand the inherent benefit of making eye contact with someone they don’t like, working through conflict in the same room, or relating to unfamiliar people and cultures. Dimon says—my guess is that most of you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room. The data backs him up. Most of us live, worship, and break bread in homogenous communities. I felt this myself during a recent work trip to California. I met many new people of all races, genders, political backgrounds, and religions that I might not see regularly in my home or my community in North Carolina.
Bureaucracy thrives in darkness. I work with large and small organizations. The more remote-first they are, the more hurdles I have to jump through to get stuff done. Stephen Covey famously wrote about the speed of trust, but there’s little speed when people don’t know one another. There’s always a formal or informal chain of command. Without relationships, the org chart drives workflow among many asynchronous and remote teams. Everyone gets caught up in command-and-control cultures, even when that’s precisely what we are trying to avoid.
I’m not saying that Jamie Dimon or any of these older leaders are correct in eliminating remote work. I’m simply saying that no system is perfect, and Dimon’s points should be heard and addressed inclusively so that remote work can thrive.
You can’t improve without feedback. I hope the next generation of leaders learns from what went right and wrong with remote work and creates a new path that is flexible, less controversial, and meets the needs of workers and employers alike.