May 16, 2012
Jamie Dimon on Leadership Qualities - 2009
Jun 30, 2009
At Harvard Business School, Jamie Dimon discussed key attributes new graduates should consistently develop if they want to be leaders. The MBA Class of 2009 asked Dimon to speak at their Class Day exercises.
"I always hesitate to give advice, because it sounds like I did it all right," Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., recently told nearly 900 graduating students. "I did not."
Dimon was at his alma mater, Harvard Business School, where the MBA Class of 2009 had invited him to speak at their Class Day exercises on June 3rd.
"I learned from making mistakes, which I hope you can avoid," continued Dimon, who received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1982.
Students had asked Dimon to focus on career management, leadership and obligations. Highlights follow.
Career management
You're responsible for your own success and happiness. There are several very important things you've got to focus on.
Learning is lifelong
It doesn't end at graduation. It's your responsibility; you have to do it consistently, all the time. I spend about 50-60% of my time learning. While reading is important, so is talking to other people. You also learn by observing other people and how they operate in very difficult circumstances. I've learned both what to do and what not do by watching others.
Building your brand
There is a book on each of you. It's already being written. If I spoke to your teachers, your friends, your professionals, your parents, I would know whether you're trusted, how hard you work, whether you're ethical—you'd be amazed at how much I'd know without even meeting you.
That book is already growing. Write it the way you want it to be written; don't let others write it for you. When you're caught in situations that are uncomfortable—you can always make the right decision. It's your responsibility whether you accept to do something or not, and it will be in that book written on you.
Dealing with failure and mistakes
When you fail, it's OK to get depressed, to cry, to blame others—for a while. But eventually, you have to get over it and move on. The greatest people who have ever walked this planet—people like Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln—constantly had setbacks and failures in life. It happens all the time in business, too. And some of your success will be based on how well you deal with failure. To be a leader, you'd better be a little tough, because you will be criticized. You have to develop a little bit of a thick skin. When you get criticism, let it roll off your back.
Also, bear in mind that a lot will happen in the next 25 years that's about more than your skills. There's luck involved. So don't get too exuberant when you do well, and don't get too depressed when you don't.
To thy own self be true
You have to fight self deception. Human beings are experts at it. I do it, too. We all need people in our lives who will bring us back to Earth.
It's important to try to understand yourself deeply. When I was in 5th grade, my teacher put a sign on the desk facing me that said, "Self control." It wasn't until I was about 45 years old that I realized that anger is a bad thing. Anger always backfires, it hurts people, you have to apologize all the time—it's better to skip it.
You all know about I.Q. and E.Q. Your I.Q.s are all high enough for all of you to be very successful, but where people often fall short is on the E.Q. Emotional intelligence is critical. It's something you develop over time. A lot of management skills are E.Q., because management is all about how people function.
In addition to emotional skills and empathy, there are other traits we have to develop and work at all the time—things like passion, work ethic, character, integrity. You are the sum of all of these things. Your I.Q. alone will not get you through the dark days or the tough times. You need to develop all these things, and develop them consistently.
Take care of yourself
You're going to get involved in very highly stressful situations. If you don't take care of yourself emotionally and physically, you will fail. Exercise is essential, and not just for the body. It clears your mind.
You have to give yourself vacations and family time. And when you have children, bear in mind that there is no such thing as quality time without quantity. Make sure you spend time with them all the time, not in short bursts.
Leadership
It is an honor, a privilege and a very deep responsibility to be a leader, whether of a small group or a larger company. You have to remind yourself if you make a mistake, you could hurt a lot of people: customers, communities, shareholders, employees, parents. I worry about this every single day.
To be a very good leader, you have to demonstrate 11 intertwined attributes:
Discipline
You have to be very disciplined. That means rigorous, detailed meetings and follow up. You have to do it consistently. It's like exercising or weeding the garden—you don't get there and stop. You have to have a strong work ethic. And you have to be always striving for improvement.
Fortitude
You have to have great fortitude and fierce resolve. Otherwise, you could be crippled by politics, bureaucracy and people who just don't want change. You have to push back against it. You have to have the ability to act.
Standards
Standards are not set by Harvard Business School or the federal governments of the world; they are set by you. You have to set high standards for performance. If you don't, you will fail. Always compare yourself to the best in your industry at a very detailed level and analyze why you're different.
Face facts
Look at the facts in a cold-blooded, honest way all the time. At management meetings, emphasize the negatives. What are we not doing well, how come the competition is doing better? People say I focus on little things about how we allocate expenses. It is not a little thing.
Openness
What you want is full sharing of information, then a debate about the right thing to do. The job of a leader is not to make a decision; it's to make sure the best decision is made. To do that, you need to get the right people in the room.
Set things up for success
Organize things that will actually work, not things that won't.
Loyalty, meritocracy and teamwork
When I was a young CEO, someone said, "We love the company, but you demoted Joe. How can we be loyal to you when you're not loyal to Joe?" Yes, we demoted Joe. And Joe was a pillar of society and a wonderful person. But Joe was no longer doing a good job. If we were 'loyal' to Joe by leaving him in that job, we would have been hugely disloyal to everybody else and the clients of the company. That, right there, is the hardest job you are going to face.
Morale
Great mistakes are made in the name of morale. One of my first jobs was at a company that had a terrible morale problem because the place was political, bureaucratic, stultifying. So the management team decided to give every employee $300 of restricted stock to give them a vested interest in the company. Did it work? Of course not. If you have legitimate complaints, you don't want $300; you want me to fix the problems. We can't buy your loyalty, and we certainly can't buy your morale. Morale comes from fixing problems, earning respect and winning. Show me a company that loses all the time, and I'll show you bad morale.
Respect
Treat all people properly and treat everyone the same, whether they're clerks or CEOs. Treat everyone equally and with respect. And promote people who are respected. Would you want your child to work for that person? If not, you really should question why you would allow that promotion to take place.
Get compensation right
To get compensation right, you have to acknowledge that failure is OK. I think there are good mistakes: you argued for it, you thought it through, you talked to the right people, and you were wrong. So you have to allow failure.
Performance is hard to judge. When we judge people's performance, we don't just look at the profit-and-loss statement. Instead we ask, did you work hard? Did you hire people, did you train people, did you do the right thing for the client? Did you help other people? Did you build systems? When we asked you to do something like recruiting, did you help us? We judge how people perform across the full spectrum.
Have real humanity
Have real humility. Humility is a deep acknowledgement that we got where we are because of things like where we were born or who our parents were. It wasn't all our own genius. We could just as easily have been born in a different place, or with a disease that we couldn't handle.
Obligations
We are very lucky. We should all acknowledge that. Most of the almost 7 billion people on this planet would gladly trade places with someone else at random. So those of us here today are very lucky—and that gives us deep obligations.
Leaders understand that they didn't build this country. We've inherited it from those who were here before. And that should be a humbling thing for all leaders.
If you want to be a leader, it can't be about money. And it can't be about you. It's about what you will eventually leave behind. What would you want on your tombstone? Think about that when you become a leader.
For mine, I just hope they say, "We miss him, and the world is a better place for him having been here."