Arguing Agile

AA208 - Jamie Dimon's Rant: Leadership Lessons on Trust and Effectiveness

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 208

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We're listening to each and every painful, cringeworthy word from Jamie Dimon's recent rant about remote work. 

Join Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando as they explore the tension between command-and-control management and outcome-based leadership. 

Stick around as they argue (against and on behalf of) CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Dimon's frustration with work-from-home culture and clear issues with his leadership, trust, and organizational effectiveness, regardless of work location.

Along the way, we also discuss:

  • The Metrics Trap: When Efficiency Overshadows Effectiveness
  • Distributed Teams/Cultures: Building Sponsorship and Mentorship
  • Bottlenecking: Decision-Making Funnels in Large Organizations
  • You Can't Fake Trust: Creating Cultures of Empowerment

#Leadership #RemoteWork #ProductManagement

remote work, leadership, organizational culture, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase, team effectiveness, decision-making, agile leadership, product management, trust in leadership, hybrid work, team empowerment, accountability, strategic leadership

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  • Website: http://arguingagile.com

Om, do you wanna get yelled at by Jamie Diamond for two and a half minutes? No. The real intro I would want to do would require me to learn how to edit and add bleeps. And I don't even want to do that. Jamie Diamond, who is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase and chairman. Just for the record. CEO and Chairman. Y'all know that I like to stay outta the headlines. I like to marinate on stuff to see how I really feel about it. So there's this Jamie Diamond rant about work from home that was leaked , about a month and a half ago we're gonna listen to the rant and talk about it. It's gonna be exciting. So there was a portion of the rant that did not make the official, recording in that portion of the rant Jamie Diamond will be portrayed by me here live on this podcast. do you wanna kick us off about how this rant started? This rant started with a question from an employee. One of his employees basically asked what you might think is a reasonable question. The employee worked on teams that are geographically dispersed. So he asked Jamie Diamond the question that basically went something like this. I'm on a, a team that is not co-located, so it doesn't make sense for me to go into the office every day of the week. the rest of the rant basically is about Jamie Diamond's response, right. And then some so, he was asking about whether Jamie Dimon would be open to giving the manager discretion over things you outlined. the part that didn't make the official audio leak says, I'm going to give you a complete answer. There is no chance that I'll leave it up to managers. Zero chance the abuse that I don't feel like I'm portraying Jamie Dimon very well right now. I need to ratchet it up for a couple levels. The abuse that took place is extraordinary. You may be a great manager, but. I'm gonna give you examples of how bad it got. 60% of Americans went to work every day during Covid. And somehow people who work in places, your manufacturing, who deliver your food, who got the food, police, firemen and other branches, a lot of you had to come into work the notion that everybody was working from home and it's great. was not true. I like how he's cherrypicking essential workers, And I'm afraid bank workers are not in that category. I'm not against working from home. I'm going to be spoiler alert. I'm gonna be defending Jamie Diamond, this podcast. So I feel, which automatically means I'm not, I feel, I feel like Om is going to be in the camp of the , normal person on this podcast but statements like this, Jamie, they don't help me defend you right now. Can I call you Jamie? I feel like we're on a first name basis. he continues to say we have 10% of our people mostly in mortgage and call centers who work from home. We started a virtual call center in Detroit. Now we have one in Baltimore. Sorry, Baltimore. It's very efficient, it's trackable in a very specific way about how efficient it is. so that, segues us into our discussion point number one, which is important to understand how Jamie Diamond thinks. The people running these larger organizations, can run a call center remotely because they have a lot of low level metrics to make sure that you're not taking advantage of them. Yeah. in this specific example he says 10%, right? 10% of the employees. I don't know how many employees they have. It's a lot. I was gonna say, we should stop and look up how many JP Morgan, chase, Just a wild guess about 30,000. I'm gonna say like over a hundred thousand. Oh, 300,000. Oh, I missed the zero., so, JP Morgan Chase has 300,000 employees worldwide operating over a hundred global markets, apparently in over 60 countries. out of 300,000 employees, he's got 10% that are working. That's massive. Yeah. it is. 10% is a lot, but at the same time, you have people in mortgages, people in the call centers actually caring for customers that need help. Of course they're working from the call center because you don't have all that environment set up in your home Tracking these statistics, to your point, low level stats, easy to track And these people have to be on the go the whole time. if you're not servicing the customer, you're servicing the last one. You are basically not idle. he's saying the mortgage people and some call center people are full-time remote that's fine. But even when we say 10%, that's 30,000 people. Alright. I'm arguing Jamie Dimon side, how many people working remote until you figure out how to fully leverage remote employees? because I would think that you could start with a team of 10, and if you're successful with a team of 10, you expand that program to a hundred. And if you're successful with a hundred, you expand that to a thousand, so you, got 30,000 employees, you got 10% of your workforce globally figuring this out and doing it successfully in a way that you're happy with.'cause he says he's happy with it. they're super efficient. He says he can track butts in seats and calls or whatever, so he is happy with it. That's what he's saying. But also you're saying for the other 90%, you haven't quite figured out a system there. So the metrics is really where this is going. I think the metrics are easier to measure for those people that are on the phone the whole time or talking to customers, et cetera. we have access to metrics from AV systems and what have you. But the others, he's saying he's not also sure if they're being efficient Using his word efficient. So , that's what I'm extracting if you claim that you're working remote We need a command control system to basically measure every keystroke, every customer call. What number of rings that the customer call makes through to your phone before you pick up, the amount of time it takes to resolve the call start of the call to the end of the call, whether you actually resolve the customer's problem or not on the call. Like there's a lot of things you could track So what he's saying is as long as I have complete command and control of your workload, then I'm okay with you working remote. Is that what he's saying? I pretty much conclude that. Exactly. Yes. And the flip side of it is he only has. Visibility through metrics for specific groupings, right? People in the call centers and people in the mortgage area. I assumed that the mortgage folks would be measured through post experience polls or what have you. Yeah. But he can actually get hard numbers there. you can look at things like meantime to resolution for any issues in the call center, But for other work that the rest of the 90% are doing the means to get to hard numbers. I think that's where he's lacking He doesn't have that. Therefore, that translates from his perspective into they not being efficient. What I'm hearing is if you can give the team the goal. And measure their contribution directly to the goal, then it's okay if they're working remotely. I didn't get that from there. So you're describing the outcome based metric here. well, that, yeah. Yes. You're right. I'm extrapolating a little bit. Yeah, exactly. the call center's outcome based metrics is you are quickly and efficiently resolving the customer's problem. Yep. We didn't talk about mortgage'cause it's not a FinTech podcast. I've done a few mortgages in my life and I do know that the mortgage process is you're in a big hurry to do a bunch of paperwork. until you get the paperwork done, then you're in a big hurry for the bank to do whatever the bank does with the paperwork They're waiting on somebody else to do something else with the paperwork. You're always waiting on somebody. Yes. In the mortgage industry it does make a lot of sense for them to be remote because it's not like they're waiting on something they can walk up to the desk of, right. To be like, Hey, I need you to read this and gimme an answer. Right now they're distributed across the world. So the Jamie Diamond version of this is like, are you gonna put all your mortgage people in one building? I know you're not. They're in wait mode all the time. And the other thing is they're basically managing handoffs. Right. And you can do that from home. Because you can see that, you can actually measure that and say, how long did it take for this particular paper instrument, whatever. Yeah. To get from A to B2C. Right, right. You can measure that. So okay. You can track efficiency there. But how do you do that with the other 90% is where his challenge is? I think so the way that I would recommend tracking that is outlining the goal for that team and then measuring their distance to the goal. Like over a time period. I, a week over week, a day over day. I don't know, like most software development teams don't make progress day over day to the goal. Yeah. You probably could measure week over week and probably have a good measurement, but I'm trying to defend the spirit of where he's going rather than the letter of where he is going. Right, which is like, I need to be watching these people like minute by minute, I'm not gonna get development top talent, product management, top talent with that attitude. But if the attitude is management has given you the goal, like pretend in a world where management is participating in your quarterly business review and says, Hey, these are the goals you should be shooting for. And then weekly you send me an update. we do quarterly business review. the business review itself is a week, like traveling and all that stuff is another week. So then we only have 10 updates To the quarterly business review. That's not a lot of bureaucracy. Just shoot me a message that says, Hey, we're on track. green, amber, red. Indicators. that's the level Jamie Diamond's at. he probably wants to be involved. get into the weeds. But again, he's the head of a 300,000 person company. there's no way he could be in the weeds. And I honestly, don't even know if he wants to, I think he's just wanting to make sure that the ship's steering in the right direction at the right speed. Right, right. so yes, outcome based, that's fine. But that culture necessitates a level of trust among people that are working For you and he started off here by saying he's not even gonna leave it up to. The managers to decide if people can work remote. Those two things I think are somewhat contradictory. If you trust your people, wouldn't you ask your managers to say, go figure out the best way to achieve your outcomes. If you think it's hybrid, if you think it's in person, if you think it's remote, whatever, and it doesn't have to be the same for all your managers, right? Depending on the type of work that their groups are doing. I would think that's the way he would've proceeded, right? If he had that trust. But what I see instead in this rant is. I'm telling you, I don't trust people Unless I see 'em this is exactly the kind of mandate or dictate that evolves into new devices like mouse, jiggers. Okay. So I'm not at my desk, but you can see me moving stuff. My mouse is moving. Right? And as long as that battery keeps going, you think I'm working well sign me on for some mouse jigglers. All right. I don't want to give points in this section because I'm gonna lose, but if I'm gonna give points in this section, my points are only gonna be given in bananas. Zero bananas for Jamie Diamond and three bananas for working remotely in those categories. Three bananas. Yeah, that's what I think. All right. He could have made better points here, but I feel it is kind of undermine, it's like, remote is not the problem. The problem is you're not setting goals for these people very clearly. that really is a problem. Well, for me, it's a bigger problem than that. For me, the problem is you are establishing the type of culture that you think you want, but is that really the right culture to be establ? Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. The other part of it is like. It's a little bit of, I don't know how to establish the right goals. So I'm kind of like raging against a machine I was forced to work remotely. Yeah. And I'm mad about it , I don't have the education to figure out how to change my organizational design from the old way of thinking to the new way of thinking. And I never thought that this was a good idea in the first place. But I've been forced to do it. So this is boiling over the top of the pot. Something that's been simmering for sure. I agree with that. And I think later on in the podcast we're gonna touch upon something a little bit. along those lines. so I got one more section before we start the real audio from this quote. Audio leak. Mm-hmm. he makes a little segment about generational impact, which he does follow up in a later section, but this is the earlier one, so let me read it. He says, in a free world, if you want to have a company working from home, that's fine. Now your managing moved to Florida. We never made a promise that it would be forever. That's their problem, not mine. people said we moved, we didn't move. We always told people we were going to it. It sounds like I'm all over the place. This is his real words, by the way. We always told people that we were going to be a work, from the office type of company. And so we allowed three days and two days. I'm assuming it's like three, three n and two, three n, two off. Yeah. But, but here are the problems. Okay? They're substantial. The young generation is being damaged by this. They may or may not be. In your particular staff, but they are being left behind socially ideas, meeting people. In fact, my guess is most of you live in communities a heck of a lot less diverse than this room. What room is he in? You mean like the boardroom? and so, it all has these kinds of effects. We actually see these other kids slowly being left behind, and I won't do that to the younger kids. What younger kids are in the boardroom? So to say they're being left behind. the next, generation doesn't wanna be cooped up they want the freedom to work from anywhere. A train. They have wifi on trains now. Jamie Choo Choo. Imagine that welcome to 2025. the claim is the younger generation is being damaged. They're being left behind., societally because they're not meeting people because they're not mixing with people and, and, and, and having ideas challenged person to person. They're being left behind that That's the claim. Okay. That is the claim, but I think it's a hollow claim. Your ideas could be shared using a plethora of different technologies now and they could be challenged again using a plethora of technologies the only thing I would say the young generation is losing out on, is the ability to spell.'cause they always abbreviate things on their devices. Alright? But AI is to the rescue again. So I think in 2025 we shouldn't be saying that the young generations being left behind if they're not in four walls that you can see them in That to me is ludicrous. I'm defending Jamie Diamond here, okay? Mm-hmm. And I don't know how I got this job. I hope it pays. That's, that's what I'm saying here. It pays in bananas, man. I mean, listen, I like bananas. I actually like bananas. So they're like this marshmallow, peanut buttery kind of flavor. I dunno what kind of bananas I'm eating, but, junior people, need in person on the spot, in the zone mentorship. they need in the conversation mentorship like when you're together in a room and you are talking through things, there is a kind of side eye body language, there's some kind of on the spot coaching that can be done in person that just doesn't translate to online, you can follow up after a meeting or slack people while the meeting's going on and do some in-person coaching. But the major claim we need to talk about is that remote work stunts. Professional development. that's the heart of what we need to talk about here. on this specific topic of not being in the same room, that trumps being remote. The problem we have today is we have a workforce that is geographically dispersed. It's corporate America that went out seeking cheap labor overseas. So you all caused this problem, Jamie, right? To try and save money. Listen, you call it cheap labor. I call it slave labor, but let's continue. exactly. cheap slave labor. So now you've caused this problem. You can't say everybody should be in the same room. Are you gonna get all of those offshore people to fly over for every meeting? I guarantee, first of all, I'm on Jamie Dimon's side. He's not talking about remote people when he's talking about this rant. First of all, he's, he's definitely not referencing anybody in India. Jamie Dimon's not going to the JPMC India office to work for a month. Okay, fair enough. So let's talk about in person in the office. Staff being remote doesn't necessarily mean they're overseas or in India They could be geographically dispersed even within the us, Canada, wherever, right? How do you get everyone together all the time? I will yield on the topic that in an ideal scenario, there's nothing that beats face-to-face conversation and if people who have listened to our podcast before, they know I'm a big fan of the journeyman model. Right. So the ability to actually look up at somebody and say, am I, how am I doing? yeah. And be coached and mentored, no doubt. But that was then, it's not today. Well, what would you say if I said listen, it's easier to establish and move that relationship forward, , that sponsorship relationship, especially when we have like I've talked to, a, I don't wanna make a big thing about this because it's, there's no women here. when I talk to women about advancing in corporate America, the main thing that comes up is we need sponsorship. what would you say if I said it's easier to get sponsorship when everyone is in person, it's harder to do that online. Yeah, definitely it is. there's no arguing against that can you get people in person all the time? You can't. So when you can go for it. When you can't make do by using social media apps, that's your next best thing, but there's more to it than just the tooling side Yeah. There's the human side of it. Be open to being reached by. People that you're working with. For example, there's a level of reasonableness here, If somebody has a question that can wait, then it should wait. But you have to make do is what I'm saying, in today's environment. So it's not a one answer fits all. Ideally, yes. Be in the office, right. But if, unless you're co-located, that's difficult to do. Yeah. Well, again, what got cut out of the audio version of the ramp, which we, we, we'll begin playing here in a second when this, when this section's over. The original question was, I'm going into an office and I'm getting online with people that are, not in the office. So is it gonna be a little bit my discretion? And Jamie Diamond's answer was no, absolutely not. Why would I trust you or your boss? Yeah. But this specific topic, there's a little bit of nuance there are some more junior people in my workforce that it's easier for them to get sponsorship in person. It's easier for them to walk around to other people's desks to get. Inspired by the seeds of innovation. When we think about peer programming, a senior will walk over to your desk and look over your shoulder as you're working through a hard problem. Or you can tap somebody in the cube next to you to be like, Hey, come over here.'cause I'm at my wits end with this stupid JavaScript thing.'cause I hate front end development or whatever that's a big advantage. There is no doubt about that. But it goes beyond just that right? It's like the ability to just like meeting somebody at the water cooler or at the coffee machine and just talking and fostering trust among your teammates. It's much easier in person., breaking bread together, Having lunch, it's much easier. But is it feasible all the time? Well, it's definitely not feasible when half your team's in India or in Seattle and you're in Boston, , that's when you're onshore. But when your three developers are in Costa Rica your tester is in Southern California and your product manager is in Florida, at that point, you lose that social capital development. Right. And that's the price you pay for trying to go after cheap labor. So back to Jamie Diamond, he's saying be in office, I'm taking the spirit of his argument. Not necessarily the letter of his argument. The culture should be moving to a place where you're saying, listen, I want sponsorship. no matter where we are, I want my culture to be recognizing people and looking for opportunities to move them up and on to the future. Same thing with innovation. if somebody on a call has an idea of like, oh, I gotta get with this other team to like, if they just added this new variable to an endpoint and API we could do this extra special thing or whatever call them and get on a call immediately. There's no reason to wait until a future refinement or , whenever your team has a normal connect, reach out to the tech leads and pull everyone together Hey guys, can we connect today? About this idea. it might be terrible, it might go nowhere, , it didn't cost us anything to talk about it for 10 minutes. There's a culture that sponsors and promotes new ideas. And then there's every other culture where it's like, you gotta, you're waiting to to that day that you go in the office To bring all this stuff up it seems more cultural to me than it does work from home or not work from home or work from wherever you are in the world, that seems less important to me I also have to ask, is it just me at this stage of experience in my career? Because I know to get the best outta my Indian developers, I gotta get on. Like if I'm on the east coast, I gotta get on at 11:00 PM when they're kicking their day off and say, Hey guys, today we discovered this thing and you need to know it right away. And you need to ask me, questions. Before I go to bed at 1145 or whatever, so that you can get a jumpstarter on your day and make the most impactful changes. when I wake up six hours later, I can find out what you did and look at your tests I feel there's an undercurrent of another cultural thing that Jamie Diamond is reacting against. This is what I meant earlier by being available To your point if somebody has an idea, just jump on a call right away. Sure. Or you could, because we are challenged time zone wise, you could have a chat channel, right? Right. That you can post your thoughts in and get. Feedback on it. And people are doing that to a certain degree, but all of those sorts of things aren't visible if you're just looking for butts in seats. Right. And so you might not think that they're actually working. Or being efficient. I being effective way trump's being efficient in my opinion. But there's, that's where we are. for the purpose of this category, I don't, feel like the strong points for or against kind of Trump one another. I'm gonna give two bananas for sponsorship and looking out for, corporate innovation over the whole organization. And also two bananas against Jamie Diamond because not understanding that like as a CEO you control the culture and can move things along. There's one finger pointing at the people that are a problem in the culture. And four fingers pointing back at you . No real movement in this category. The next section of the podcast, we actually have the leak to audio. There's tons of YouTube videos, TikTok videos, about the, the actual leak to audio. So from here you won't hear my wonderful voice narrating Jamie Diamond. You'll actually hear Jamie Diamond narrating Jamie Diamond, which I have to say um, he might have had one or two drinks before this. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. A lot of you were on the Zoom and you were doing the following. Okay. You know, look at your mail, sending a text to each other when the other person is okay. Not paying attention, not reading your stuff you know, and if you don't think that slows down efficiency, creativity creates rudeness and so it does. Okay. And when I found out, the people are doing that. You, you don't do at my meetings. You're gonna meet with me. You got my attention. You got my focus. I don't bring my phone I'm not saying text to people. Okay. It simply doesn't work and it doesn't work for creativity. It slows down decision making. And don't gimme the to work from home. Friday works. I call a lot of people on Friday. They're not a person to get ahold of, He's saying, zoom is a dysfunctional way of running a company. People are being rude by DM and the digital tools are enhancing these bad behaviors and meetings are being run poorly, basically. That, that, that's his claims here. Yeah, I think just kind of just rebut that a little bit. When you're in person, you're still doing that. I've seen people holding their phones under the desk, so this doesn't go away. Ultimately, it comes down to having good. Team spirit and culture and that can happen whether you're on Zoom or not. If you don't have it, don't look at the tooling and blame just the remote situation. there's more to it than that. I've been part of very effective Zoom meetings where you do see people occasionally meetings are long and people get bored. So instead of admonishing them, give 'em a break Again, I'm on Jamie Damon's side. I'm just trying to figure out what I can do to run a 300,000 person global company as best as I can. But also if I'm Jamie Diamond, I'm, asking you like, Hey, I don't know a better way to do this. What is a better way to do this? I got all these people, sniping at each other or whatever, and this is not the culture I want. what are my options here? I think so first of all, your options should not be to mandate that people don't get on Zoom. Your options probably include letting the managers that report to you figure out how they wanna run their teams. Because every team is unique, So let them figure it out. Trust them to get the job done. Give them some outcomes and goals that they buy into, and then they will fulfill those goals. What if I don't like the way they're fulfilling those goals. Then you mandate they come back to the office like he's doing, right? Oh, no, because, what do you really want? Do you wanna exercise control over each and every one of your 300,000 employees or do you want good outcomes? So your share price goes up, and therefore your bonus goes up. We haven't talked about JPMC share price because JPMC share price has just gone up and up since they've been working from home. only now very recently since February when these mandates kind of went into place, has things been dropping down? So like, so you could probably take that out of the equation because everybody's share price has been going on. I, I would say, I would say nothing he's done with pushing back against work from home has financial impact. Cultural impact. Yes. Yes. I'm trying to make an cultural impact. I'm trying to say we need to build a great company. The things I've done pushing against remote haven't seen to make an impact. So I think if, again, I'm defending Jamie Diamond here again. It doesn't, it seems that I have a culture problem. How can I make an impact on my culture problem knowing that I'm still gonna be global, I still need global communications, some of which are remote, right? Unless I'm willing to pay times a thousand or whatever. Yeah. To have people start ver, start really traveling office to office, to have in person syncs to be like, that's not gonna happen. Yeah yeah. Yeah. You can bankrupt the whole company, , I'm not gonna do that. what I am asking you again Like you, you probably could just have virtual meetings as long as there's someone to facilitate those to make sure that you're. Moving towards the goal. Like what is the goal? What is the, like in the military, you have commander's intent. You have the, Hey, this is the letter of what I need done. But the commander's intent outlines the spirit of like, Hey, this is what I like, this is what we need. Right. The what and the why. Exactly. and then let the teams figure out how We always say that in agile, but it's actually true here too, right? So if you have the tooling, for facilitating virtual meetings, the part that's lacking might well be decent facilitation skills. And recognizing the fact that people are in different time zones. some people on your call will be during the day, EST time, let's say, or PSD time. Other people might well be talking to you from their dinner table. so allow for that. In your calls. It's okay if somebody's kid comes running up to them And taps 'em on the shoulder because that's a normal thing to do. And where they are, this kid's about to go to bed, they just, you know out there to kiss goodnight To their parent. Allow for that. it needs you to recognize that and then work toward that culture. I feel this is a culture that we're outlining that is not a superior culture when it comes to asynchronous communications. When you say not superior, what do you mean? Yeah. I I, I thought you were gonna have extra questions about a lot of people will probably have extra questions about that. is there a synchronous communication culture That's being pushed back against which is my manager comes down, says, I need this thing, I need it by this date. Make it happen. You say Yes. There's really not a lot you can say other than that. And then the updates to get to that point are done asynchronously or you say you need this thing and then the asynchronous pushback in order to do this thing, we need X and Y and Z, right? Well, we need to solve these things. Or it could potentially be these other teams need to do these other things, and then you as a manager have to go facilitate those in other parts of the business, right?, there is a superior, asynchronous communication mechanism that goes back to we had a podcast a long time ago with Ed talking about an asynchronous standup. Right about like, Hey, can this be effective? And I was, I actually, I remember that podcast because I was on the other side saying you shouldn't have asynchronous. Because it adds a burden to your team. But if you're gonna do this well, and if I'm gonna argue against Jamie Diamond here to say, Hey, how do I do this asynchronously? So it's as fast as a synchronous conversation. We throw a message in the Slack channel with all the decision makers and say, Hey, we need this thing decided, we need this thing done. And I'm not sure who can do it, but when I throw it into this channel and say, I need a thing done, the people in the channel are the right people to say, this is the right person. And then they can make the decision there's something here about, hey, in the office we can just walk up to that person's desk. And ask them, right? I also realize as I'm bringing this up, like you're a company of 300,000 people. Unless 300,000 people are in one office building, it's still not possible. even if they were, it would take you half a day to get to the other side of the building. Then you find that the person you're looking for is gone to lunch. Listen, there are challenges no matter what, in today's climate, we can throw out the discussion possibility of having 300,000 people in a building, right? It's not gonna happen. So what do we do instead? We give people proper trust. We give them the direction, the what and the why, and let them figure out how to solve the problem. That's what we do. Now, if you wanna measure them by hours spent at their desk, or keystrokes , are you really measuring the right thing? That's the question I would ask. Why are you measuring that? It's a good way of measuring the temperature of your culture is what I'm saying. Yeah. So for the purpose of scoring this category, if you can fit 300,000 people in your corporate office and go to all their desks and have 'em all working on one floor, great. You get a banana, you get a whole basket of bananas. But because I know that it is not feasible or reasonable, you get no bananas. So no bananas are given. But when you're Jamie Diamond, if you're saying that facilitation is strategic, just like having a mortgage department is strategic and there are things as are, that are strategic in your business. If you're sing. Having good facilitation from team to team is strategic. you can hire a person to help Make these strategic conversations happen from team to team. And that's at least deserving of two bananas. if it's a banana thing, it, so far has been, so we'll continue that scale. two bananas against Jamie Damon. Sorry, Jamie Damon. I'm doing my best here, man., you gotta stop cursing. It's hard to edit on the podcast. lead by example, basically. I mean, I'm not going that far. All right. let's go 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. 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, you're filling that request 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 chairman of committees. I can't stand it anymore. Now you have a choice. You don't have to work with JP Morgan. So the people of you who don't wanna work with the company, that's fine with me. Alright, this was quite a rant. What he's focusing on has nothing to do with remote versus non-REM remote. What he's focusing on is the bureaucracy of running a giant company the bureaucracy enables bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy like he's saying why can't you just make a decision? Why you gotta go through committee? I have no idea, like in his world what wealth management means, but he's just 14 committees or whatever. I don't know if that's an exaggeration. I could understand what he's saying of why can't these people just make a decision and run with it? The fact that you have a bureaucracy where the decisions are not pushed down to the lowest level, to the people doing the work to make the decision, and then the results of the decision are pushed back up. that's not the culture. The culture is everyone's afraid of being pointed at to be the person that made the decision. So they keep deferring. that's kind of what he's pointing out. So there's safety numbers. So the, the people are making decisions by committee. That way when Jamie perks up and says, who made this decision? The answer isn't Fred or Mary. The answer is it's ex committee. Right? Yeah this group. that's why. listen, it is not surprising that that's happening because the culture is not one where trust is. Prevalent primarily it's basically threat, he says that in that clip. If you don't wanna work here, I'm fine with that you gotta lose good people. First of all, if you keep this up. there are some culture problems. But I would like to throw out there's something we do to say, to help Jamie Diamond that I, that's what we're doing on the podcast now. We're helping Jamie Dimon like management by walking around the old gemba walk in this case. If you're doing the gemba, does this category go away? or is there just a level of , there's just too many people at the company where the gemba doesn't cut it where are we at at this point? Like, I, I like, I, I admittedly like I'm outta my depth here'cause like 300,000 people. I just don't know how you even conduct business at that point. it's a big number, but then again, you could ask the question, What is the right number? Well, you don't know. So gemba is a beginning of, of this whole thing, right? It just observe, see what's going on, and then try and trim down and make more, efficient, but more effective, in my words, right? Every part of the business. you may want to take that approach instead of saying, well if for every hundred I'm gonna cut out 10 people and I'll be fine. You'll be fine, but you're gonna lose good people. If 'cause the 90 that I left May well be already overburdened. You don't know that. Well, again, I'm, I'm arguing on the side of Jamie Damon. Sure. From his perspective, he's got these decisions that are being pushed up to him or deferred it seems to him, the folks in charge of these segments of the business can't make decisions. what I'm getting out of this is. You are trying to absolve yourself of the, accountability Of making a decision. the reason that you're sitting in that seat is you are accountable to make the decisions. I've promoted you to be in that spot, that director spot, or VP spot, whatever it is. To talk to your people. Take the best evidence you have at the time, and make the decision. I'm the product manager on the podcast for people who don't listen to the podcast. Right. I wanna know oh, we made the decision to work on Project X over project Y. Okay. what decisions Have you pushed off the table? to do Project X. The opportunity cost let me know. It's X versus y. it could be a quick recap in our staff meeting a high level CEO meeting or a quarterly roadmap meeting Hey, we decided to prioritize X over Y and here's y Yeah. Real, real quick. And, and, and here's what, here's the evidence that led us to believe that. And then if I am the CEO, like Jamie Diamond couldn't empower a bunch of people who have direct budgets to go to the individual quarterly road mapping, right? And be like, oh, I'm gonna fund this. Not that, it's real easy to take control of this stuff when you're controlled money and to say tell me your evidence of YX over Y and then if it didn't sound strong enough. Then I with control the purse strings, I'm gonna challenge it in that meeting and if I decide to proceed regardless, then we need to have a separate conversation. And then some of this comes into play, that's the product manager and me has those blinders on. I already collected the evidence. I feel where he's coming from. He has a culture that is, not bringing all these things to the table and talking equally amongst each other. there's some sort of dysfunction here that he's really railing against. The culture really speaks to me of being risk averse. And there's probably a reason behind that. We don't know what that is 'cause I don't know the company in inner workings But to your point, yeah. evidence-based decision making and being empowered to make it, is the right approach here. Right. And in real life, I don't even know if some of these other directors, VPs will even go to him. Right. They would probably go to their VP of Finance or CFO and say here are the bets. This is the one we would like to make, here's why. And whatever that person says is the right decision I wanna hope that they take evidence into account, but hope is not a strategy. Gathering evidence and actually doing your job. as a product manager doing your job and being unburdened from being brow beaten to make the quote Right. Update You know, the update that makes your manager happy versus the real update, are we gonna bankrupt our company by making people feel better about decisions sometimes it's not even the decision. Sometimes my manager thinks this is the way to go decision X is better than decision y. So I'm just gonna not go down avenue y as much as I could have gone down Avenue X. I deal with that all the time in product management I don't often talk about my current work on the podcast. One of the current week's meetings with all the product managers in the business. I went against the director of product management and it was, it was one of those things where I was talking and the director was asking why I was challenging. The current status quo, and none of the other product managers on the call were saying anything like, it was one of those uncomfortable meeting. They probably went to make popcorn. They didn't want to say any, they didn't want to say anything, because it was so uncomfortable. But again, I'm at a senior level in product management I can bring up, like this thing doesn't seem to work and you guys seem to be all on board with it. Let's stop for a second and talk about is this a long-term play or is this like a current, thing we love this week and next week is gonna be gone and dig into it, a lot of people are not comfortable in the middle of that conversation. After the conversation is over and we all agree this is the evidence we need to go offline and bring back to advance the conversation. They're okay having that part of the conversation the post gathering evidence, but they're not okay with the, let me challenge what you think is the top priority and let me present an alternate and let me kind of lobby for, we should go gather evidence over here or over there a lot of people are not Okay. Getting through that initial disagreement.' , because. Going back to arguing Agile 1 98. Of crucial conversations. a lot of people don't know how to bring that conversation up without damaging the relationship. You're absolutely right. They wanna protect that relationship equity. I, I understand that. It, it is very common actually. I my line of work, it's the same thing, people just simply nod up and down and then after the meeting they'll go, why are we doing this? What is, yeah I, I, I think your line of work, like the organizational design and arranging relationships to, to better work organizationally, I think that's a more difficult conversation than product management. Product management is like, I, can run an A to B test and get immediately the answer I need. In the, in the, how do we arrange an organized teams conversation? That's a much more difficult it's harder to get evidence in that conversation, which it's long term basically. Right? You've gotta do lots of plays and get evidence long term. Yeah. okay. Well so I've awarded one banana for hoping that we can get better and three bananas for actually getting better. So there we go. let's move on. let's finish this and then we'll go to our last point and move to closing. I'm not, I'm not mad at you. Don't be mad at me. It's a free country. Sorry. I'm not mad at you. I'm. Do you have psychological safety I'm not yelling is how I talk. I wasn't ready for that. You can walk with your feet but this company's gonna set our own standards and do it our own way. I've had it with this kind of stuff and you know, I, I come in I've been working seven days of weeks since Covid, and I come in and I, where's everybody else, whether they here and there and Zoom and the Zoom don't show up and people say they need guest up. that's not how you run a great company. We didn't build this great company by doing that, by doing the same semi disease that everybody else does. His ending to this is kind of clunky. Okay I wanna try to correct his ending to this a little bit before we start debating it. Sure. the bureaucracy that has evolved and has slowed things down has sort of evolved from leadership choices. Okay. and he's pointing out like, we should have some kind of trigger to help us adjust and correct the bureaucracy to make things more streamlined. I don't know what that mechanism looks like. we can work on that if I was Jamie Diamond, I'd hire some consultants or coaches to help me streamline my bureaucracy to the top Basically my goal setting apparatus from the top. Also I feel he's trying to say some parts of our company are doing it right. A lot of our company's doing it. Wrong, the whole backbiting firing off dms at people being rude over email or not showing up on time, that kind of thing. if Jamie Diamond was here in the studio with us and is like, Hey listen, I'll do whatever, 'cause I'm the CEO, what are some things I can do and immediately fix my culture? obviously your bureaucracy and the things we talked about in the previous segments, stem from your leadership choices. So when he is like, oh, I can just get rid of these 14 chairman or whatever okay, cool, you should get rid of those 14 chairman and you should get chairman in that. Understand the point of being a chairman is to bubble up to the CEO these are the decisions that we made. This is the information we had while we made them. And these are the things that we traded off to make those decisions. You need better communication, but if those people are so overloaded that you can't get that from them, you need a trained facilitator that goes with each of those people to help your bureaucracy as it grows. And you need to consider that strategic in the same way. The last podcast we talked about this is like, what does it mean by, I consider it strategic. I consider it strategic means. There's no ROI on this thing. It is top priority and I'm willing to pay anything to have it done, meaning. I consider it strategic to have excellent communication when it comes To my leadership team. If you're not willing to do that, you've deprioritized that channel, and now we're questioning your motives I'm questioning my life. what am I even doing here? so I absolutely agree with what you just said about considering these as strategic, right? First of all. it's a deliberate decision, To say this is important enough for us to work on right now if we don't have the expertise in house, we're going to get. Expertise from outside to help us and train our people. but to his point about the decision latency, right? Committed decisions, can be worked on by changing the culture and that begins at the top, with him. start to foster trust among your leadership team so they're not afraid of making decisions. then go in there with the stuff you talked about, Facilitation skills. Make sure the people can make those decisions without fear repercussions, as long as they are data-driven, evidence-based, if you do that, I think you'll find that, things will be a whole lot better. Instead of just saying things like, I can get by with 90 people instead of a hundred, because you don't know that, right? Again, I'm on Jamie Damon's side in this conversation. You have to set up the culture that you want to live in, okay? You have to build the house that you wanna live in. You have to go and cut the palm fronds and put them on the roof to keep the rain out. that's your job. the minute you start blaming other people for like, oh, my roof leaks on me, if only these other people , you immediately like re like I ceede all bananas. All, all three bananas. That's like three bananas. That's right. I, I only had one written down, but I'm gonna write three down. I ceede all three of my bananas to everyone else when I start blaming other people like this. When you are the leader, when you are the number one person in the organization, you don't get to blame anybody. There's a future podcast on , the book Extreme Ownership that I want to do. That talks about this specific thing. You don't get to say, oh no, all these people are Zoomers or or, oh, it's because of the pandemic. all these people are taking their direction from you. The number one person at the top. So what are you gonna do to move the culture ahead , like ranting and cursing at some random manager in your organization on a Tuesday , did you go to happy hour at lunch and come back and then hold the company? Meaning there's not a lot of excuses here. I agree with that. Absolutely this is kind of management by threat. It doesn't work very well. And that's exactly what I saw there in the last few seconds of the clip but you know, what will change this? what would motivate somebody like Jamie Diamond to say. I wanna change the culture. Where's the w film in that for him? Well, I think, I think the the ghost of Christmas future coming, visiting you at midnight. Listen, it's a lot simpler than that. Lemme tell you. so, whatever equations are being used today for him to accrue his bonus, throw in another variable in there, improve the culture. Hang on, hang on. What? So he gets paid based on how much he improves the culture. How about that for a change if he's in it for the long term? Yeah. I'm not gonna hold my breath for that. I'm not either. Well like, okay, so just a tally tally me bananas. So the four Jamie Diamond in his original rant form I believe we have 3 bananas and we have 11 bananas against. So as far as monkeys go and bananas like Jamie Diamond you have some mindset changes to make in this category. Hopefully before the next video like that, he's spent some time improving these things. Well, I'm just shouting at people's, he's the only one that can improve every category we've talked about. absolutely. Agreed. let us know what you think about what we discussed today, Jamie and anybody else for that matter. And don't forget to like and subscribe. 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