Last Man Standing

(Dimon is vocal about his antipathy toward much of the consulting used by large corporations today, with the notable exception of McKinsey & Co. “It’s substitute management,” he says. “A Good Housekeeping seal of approval. It’s political, so if you make a decision you can say, ‘It’s not my fault, it’s their fault.’ I remember at Citigroup when we hired a consulting firm to do a study about how our capital was deployed. I thought, ‘What is wrong with us? Shouldn’t this be the job of management? Shouldn’t we understand capital?’ I do think consultants can become a disease for corporations, and I don’t say that lightly, because I really do believe it. We do still use smart people to do consulting for us. But it has to be with a very senior person and there is no phase two. By that, I mean at the end of the project, I have the brain and they have the money. I don’t need anyone to implement anything. That’s a joke. You can’t have outside people implement stuff inside companies. It doesn’t work. And by the way, if that’s going on, what the hell are your own people doing?”) (Location 2480)

“I care that we do it right…. If you work in a company where you can’t walk in the room and say what you think, you create an atmosphere where you don’t do the best you can and where people don’t disclose things.” (Location 3107)

Warren Buffett thinks Dimon separated himself from the pack by relying on his own judgment and not becoming slave to the software that tried to simplify all of banking into a mathematical equation. “Too many people overemphasize the power of these statistical models,” he says. “But not Jamie. The CEO of any of these firms has to be the chief risk officer. At Berkshire Hathaway, it’s my number one job. I have to be correlating the chance of an earthquake in California not only causing a big insurance loss, but also the effect on Wells Fargo’s earnings, or the availability of money tomorrow. Any big institution has a lot of risks that can be modeled reasonably well. Somebody at the top has to be thinking about that stuff every day. Jamie is the kind of guy you want to have running an institution like that. (Location 3639)