Companies should remove managers who prioritize procedure over results, warning that bureaucracy can quietly undermine organizations from within, said JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon.
“Bureaucracy, complacency and arrogance will take down a company,” Dimon said at Norges Bank Investment Management’s investment conference in Oslo on April 28. “Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else.”
Dimon, who has led JPMorgan since 2006, has overseen its growth from a roughly $130 billion company into the world’s largest bank by market value, according to media reports.
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Fighting Bureaucracy From The Top
Dimon said bureaucracy can spread in organizations of any size, from large corporations to small departments, if leaders fail to address it early.
He said the solution starts with management accountability and removing leaders who become too attached to procedures rather than outcomes.
“Get rid of the jerks,” Dimon said at the conference, referring to managers who favor process over execution.
“They admire a problem,” he added. “I say they’re like good bureaucrats. They like the process, not the outcome. Whereas I like the outcome.”
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Small Teams, Faster Decisions
One sign of bureaucracy is when employees withhold information or create unnecessary delays, Dimon said.
At JPMorgan, he said meeting materials are distributed in advance to ensure participants have access to the same information before discussions begin, arguing that withholding information creates needless friction within organizations.
“If [information] isn’t shared properly, I generally just cancel the meeting,” Dimon said at the conference.
Despite running one of the world’s largest financial institutions, Dimon said he prefers assigning critical work to small, focused teams rather than large committee structures.
“Get the people in the room and work it out,” he said. “Don’t allow it to go back and forth with groups for six months or nine months or a year.”
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A Broader Push Against Corporate Red Tape
Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy has also pushed to streamline management layers since taking over the company in 2021 as part of a broader effort to operate like the “world’s largest startup.”
In September 2024, Amazon said managers would be expected to oversee larger teams as part of broader restructuring efforts aimed at reducing organizational layers.
The company also launched a “bureaucracy mailbox” that allowed employees to flag unnecessary processes and internal inefficiencies. Amazon said the initiative resulted in hundreds of operational changes in its first year.
“I would say bureaucracy is really anathema to startups and to entrepreneurial organizations,” Jassy said at the company’s annual conference for third-party sellers in September, according to media reports. “As you get larger, it’s really easy to accumulate bureaucracy, a lot of bureaucracy that you may not see.”
As Jamie Dimon pushes …
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