CEO Conversations: Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

welcome i'm marco davis president and ceo of chci and thank you for joining us for our ceo conversation i'm joined today by none other than jamie dimon the chairman and ceo of jpmorgan chase and company jamie thanks for being here we're really excited to be able to talk i'm told you came to see me and i'm thrilled to be doing this thank you awesome well first off just asking how is new york doing how is uh how are you all facing now that it seems like things have gotten better well i would say not great i mean if you look at new york i mean i hope it's great you walk around you saw it's much better than it was before but businesses aren't still back here the restaurants are suffering i think the poor neighborhoods are having a terrible time unemployment's way up yeah uh crime is up so and you know tax revenues are down all that so we're we're facing a kind of a difficult time we should check to be very thoughtful about it still a long way from being out of the woods yes well speaking of new york you're i think sometimes described as kind of a quintessential new yorker i grew up in jackson heights right down there and uh uh which you can almost you can almost see where i grew up from these windows over here so yeah i'm a quintessential new yorker given the life you've led is there any are there lessons from your childhood from growing up anything you think that you you know you carry with you that are the kinds of things people could learn from yeah yeah well you know but my parents were real moralists so you they you know you do the right thing you only do the right thing you treat people everyone equally and fairly my mom was one of the earliest women's libers around after reading uh you know some of those uh books and stuff like that so uh so you learn a lot from that you know back then it was much tougher and you know today the words people use that back then the slang they used racial slangs was like every race and religion yeah yeah a lot of good progress now of course for none of us life is uh uh ever easy we we face our share of challenges and setbacks are there any particularly um that stand out in your mind that you learn from that you overcame that would be kind of insightful for people i'll give you two somebody's like more personal so i had throat cancer which is kind of tough and i had a heart surgery uh recently and i think i don't know what lessons you learn from that other than you're lucky to be alive we're lucky to be in america because i don't think i would have survived had i had this heart problem i had maybe in a lot of other countries and it does make you be a little more deliberate i mean what are you doing what do you want to get done how much time do you have on this planet things like that the other one i think is maybe more instructive to people which is i was fired from a job i mean all of us have had setbacks and you know a lot of people in their personal lives their professional lives and it's not that you can't cry about it's not that you can't get depressed it's not you can't but you got to get over it you got to learn from it and move on you know i was fired by a guy who worked for 15 years i was surprised and you know kind of this fall race and stuff like that and there's life after death you know you just got to keep keep on going and not spend all your time looking backwards it's not about revenge it's about moving forward yeah and clearly you're an excellent testament of a second act right back up and rising above and you are uh highly regarded for for effective leadership both your management of the corporations you lead but i think really as a as a model public figure do you have a kind of a philosophy or approach is there a way in which you you think about your leadership that folks could learn from yeah i i write a lot about this too and stuff like that and of course i've learned a lot of this by watching other people learning from other people so it's not like you're born with with dna but i think you are born some things so so piece first of all is the discipline analytics work ethic over and over and over people would be surprised the analytics and detail and reporting and discipline and transparency and and it's much more than people think right but that's not the best part the most important part of leaders the most important part of leadership particularly as you move up an organization i'm going to say is the eq humility and by that what i mean is you know do you earn people's respect do people want to work for you people don't want to work for a jerk you know people don't want to work for someone who blames them when something goes wrong you know is always scapegoating they want to work for someone they trust and respect who wants to make them better uh so you can be tough on people humility doesn't mean humble but it means you realize you don't know everything gotcha you've got a lot to learn those people are more experts in these areas than you are your job you're like no longer the quarterback you might like to coach the team trying to get the best out of everybody right and it's kind of a different thing and the eq around that is you know do you recognize when people are hurt you know can you have empathy for people do you do you understand that that person is not speaking up and maybe they have something to add and you kind of go out of your way so it's this whole range of stuff is not normally considered leadership but it's kind of love humanity respect of people that make it real leaders yeah well that makes a ton of sense i mean we often talk about the fact that that lead particularly in our community but i think really anywhere that leadership is not so much about the individual even though it feels that way when you read the textbooks but like i think you just said it's really about the people you're leading right and working with them responding to them right and since these are ceo conversations what would you say is something that's a particularly kind of challenging or tough aspect or tough decisions you make as a ceo anything that stands out it's you you better be pretty tough i mean you're under constant uh i mean first of all some of the other things a lot of decisions are way to be found you do the work you get the right people in the room you're not saying they're guessing doesn't like go to my office i think oh my god but but the people decisions the hardest and the the hardest to make the easiest to make a mistake the hardest to correct you know in other words i have to do the right thing the right thing is not always easy to do yeah and and if i don't do the right thing the organization hurts and so that to me is probably the hardest aspect of it but again if you the more you have very good people around you the easier it is to identify them think about them figure out the resolution and even if you have to remove people from their jobs or something like that which you have to do do it respectfully don't embarrass people don't hang them out to dry you know if they worked at a company for 20 years actually they may not be the best player for that position anymore it doesn't mean you should embarrass them so there's a lot of ways to do things to do them right but you know like a lot of people i avoid some of the tough decisions too but i make a list like literally on the weekends about what am i avoiding oh wow what have you told me jamie it's time for you to you're allowing this to go on for too long and problems don't age well yeah so i try to be very open to hear from you and then to make sure it goes on a list somewhere that i say just focus on it don't don't don't allow to go get bad or get worse something like that and do you have the right people involved the decision and what's the process by which you make an intelligent decision and like i said it's not guessing right everyone should have a decision-making process about who they speak to and how they look at their options how they really think it through fairly before they make a decision wow that's great that's that's a lot of really important uh and useful useful information thanks for that so let's switch gears a little bit we were talking about this uh just a little bit uh regarding new york um covet 19 obviously is sort of changing frankly everything right in our society um how would you say that uh jp morgan chasing company in particular but really the banking industry in general how have they responded to cover 19. what's their role in all this and in particular uh how do you see the dynamics with relation to the hispanic community yeah so i could i put it on a broader perspective he had covert 19 and you know it's uncovered a lot of terrible things that we didn't fix in society and they had the murder of george floyd yes but but in both cases they're uncovering things we already knew about i mean the black community hasn't had parody since world war since the civil war and we've been talking about it and coveted 19 most disasters hurt the poor community's worse they hit the risk communities yeah that's true for hurricanes it's true for pandemics it's true for recessions and it but it shows you the mistakes we've made in society and if you made a list of those mistakes and they're all around policy around how we do safety nets around health care around inner city school education around job creation around infrastructure around small business formation and so you know it's a lot of these big companies have always been very good at trying to be good corporate citizens good community citizens and you know to help in a million different ways and banks of course much broader than that you know since we're involved in financing so many people but one of the wonderful things that has come out of covet 19 and the murder of george floyd is now you see a lot of society saying it's time to do more yeah so the business roundtable which i used to be the chairman of i know rm has said we're going to do more for the for the latinx community and the black community and and real stuff so we've always done philanthropy we've always done affordable housing we've always done you know training and diversity and recruiting and all these various things but to do more double down so we actually we have groups now they're working on how can you get more capital into black small businesses we have a thing called the emperor of color fund they actually for latinx and for black you know to to go beyond normal banking to get loans to entrepreneurs of color you know affordable housing you know to do more affordable housing but to get more money into it so you know we do billions of dollars a year but now i'm getting calls from other big companies saying i want to do it too i don't know how to oh wow so we're saying okay we're gonna try to create more funds they can do that so um small business but one and probably the biggest is education okay so you know my wife does a tremendous amount of work in the south bronx but take the south bronx they they were doing better and better and better now unemployment i'm say 30 percent they don't have as much living space a lot of people go to food banks for food the kids didn't have computers my wife went out of way to get you know computers and food to tens of thousands of kids personal this was not a jp morgan thing though jaybird does a lot of that stuff too but you know now the unemployment is like 30 percent so we just started something in new york called the new york city jobs council right where ceo is going to be involved in helping the disadvantaged work in the community college of new york uh see cuny i mean which is 500 000 people but the goal and we all have a common goal not is to get you through school whether it's high school or a community college or college where when you get out you have a living wage yes okay so in bronx they have the alfred smith school you know 85 percent of these kids graduate and they make forty five thousand dollars a year because they learn how to maintain automobiles and of course they're largely a minority the aviation high school right across the bridge over here long island city you know 95 percent of the kids i've got how many travel of graduate average comp 60 000 maintaining small aircraft and of course they travel two or three hours a day their parents want them to go there yeah so jobs education and jobs and communities and i do think the business community should lift help lift up society yeah you know one of the things the business community the big companies which i think they already do a great job with their own employees their own health care their own philanthropy all these various things but also they could drive by literally and figuratively the worst neighborhoods of america yes and they shouldn't they should get involved in fixing it government with all due respect government alone can't do it these things are complex problems they need real policy and real solutions they need sustained effort money capital time we need to test what works and what doesn't work we got a lot of programs that never worked and but we have a common interest we teachers the unions everyone say we want these kids to graduate and get these fabulous jobs and and and lift up all society if you lift up all of society by the way and this is important for everyone everyone's better off it's better social outcomes it's less crime it's more jobs i tell people if canada and people act like it's a zero-sum game you know if canada was a failed country that would be terrible for america economically socially military et cetera so if we can get south bronx up to canada it's great for america and i think you're going to have to have it's a consolidated effort of civic society schools teachers unions business who's got the wherewithal the capability the capital the knowledge and government there's got to help and we all have to work together if we're going to fix these problems and the first thing you're going to do is acknowledge the problem like 50 percent of the kids in inner city schools do not graduate and a lot of the kids do graduate are not prepared for a job and you know that that is a flaw which you know it's gone on generational now it's unfair it's unjust it's wrong it needs to be fixed well and and you touched on something that that is a something that we talk about at chci which is this idea of not just the interplay but to be effective needing familiarity with the various sectors right um we uh suggest and encourage our leaders to get experience in public policy right by interning or doing their fellowships on capitol hill but we encourage them to also get to know the private sector to to work in the in the nonprofit sector do you think that's something that can be beneficial for a leader to to have uh ideally even first-hand knowledge in the various sectors does that maybe make them more effective in their work with that absolutely i had a friend who was a very liberal very very smart harvard law guy he wanted to work in you know work for judges and stuff like they want to try business and i got him a job at a company and he was shocked how the people were mostly ethical trying to do the right thing you know not that companies don't make mistakes they make huge mistakes you know like uh but but also those of us in the private sector don't necessarily know what it's like to be the demands in government you know so yeah absolutely if i can walk in your moccasins a little bit you can welcome mine a little bit we're going to be better off in how we understand each other and i always ask people who've been on one side or the other or both yeah you know why don't you write up a piece of paper like okay lessons to you know congress folk yeah that now that i'm in congress but i was a business person and vice versa lessons from people in congress who've been in business what would you teach the business people who aren't in congress so absolutely i think there's nothing like that kind of thing that's awesome we used to have much more of that in this country if you look at what's happened in the country less and less did people do different things so we don't you know we have less and less about you know the citizen congress folks that's true right and and i think we would all be better off to spend time with each other yeah yeah there's i think there's much too much specialization these days let's talk a little bit about uh the latino community specifically the latinx community uh and jpmc how do you think you all are doing as a firm vis-a-vis community what are you hearing from your employees from the communities you serve so you know we obviously we've had diversity drivers for years but many years ago i sat down and they were telling how great we're doing you know with diversity in total and but i said no no let's let's do it by group not you know so we did lgbt black women hispanic disagree the fact is for the most part we're doing great with all of them other than black we're doing better with black than most companies better than venture capital private equity law firms and stuff like that but not jp morgan good so but with the latinx community and we have adelante i think we got 17 000 employees you're part of that really good we were the first to do matricular cards i went to see them they said jamie all we need is a little more help and organization to do more and one of my direct i have of all my direct reports two i think they're like 13 or 14. two lgbt one is hispanic two are brits more than fifty percent of women so you know in some ways good but it does not mean you can't do better so i think if you're you know if your folks came in they met with other people that you'd say no jamie you could do this better you could do that but i'm sure that's true yeah and so but we do a tremendous amount of the latinx community yeah and we're always focusing on it we and we have spanish-enabled call centers and and documents and stuff like that and and i assume you're targeting investments right given some of the communities you see we're targeting investments so everything we're doing for entrepreneurs of color is latinx and black okay okay advancing uh black pathways affordable housing it's both okay and of course you know a lot of it has to go to poor neighborhoods yeah because if you want to attack the problem you've got to go to the neighborhood and that also includes poor white people yep you're also wrapped up in this uh cycle of poverty and things like that so uh so there's always more to do and on the philanthropic side uh i know uh you all are making some investments some commitments uh anything stand out in your mind of some of the work that you're doing that yeah so you know i'm gonna give you a a concrete example uh because it's maybe more important so we give we do a lot of money but think of jp more in this philanthropy which is grants money there's people capital which is enormous and maybe if you went to somewhere place they'd say no jp morgan their money helped their people helped even more so we actually you know have succumbed people to help some of these organizations and then there's a lot of lending we do on top of that right so taking affordable housing we'll advise the bill the person will put in the grant money sometimes for equity to help them get going and then we'll lend a hundred million dollars wow so we we kind of do this so the effort itself is huge we do it around the world one of the benefits about that is people don't believe it but they're slums in paris their kids don't have jobs in paris you know there and but you learn what do people do in switzerland around apprenticeships what do they do in germany around apprenticeships how do you make society work better for everybody and then we disseminate that so we have this huge effort uh taking place but what we did in detroit is maybe the most important what we learned the most we said we're going to go in all of us as opposed to your affordable housing your small business one group sustained effort it was i think uh 200 million dollars over five or six years working with civic society the mayor who's outstanding there doing schools affordable housing education we changed laws so we can give second chance to formerly incarcerated folks and it really makes a difference so if you went to talk to the mayor they say jp moore has helped the city like enormously and so the lessons from that i can extend your case on that one yeah or maybe the most important and um that's great and we're we're we're now doing something in the south bronx la chicago san francisco because that actually is an accelerant of how you can help fix society and it's like a comprehensive but but here's an amazing thing okay is they blame democratic citizens he's a democratic mayor who i spoke to recently is fabulous mayor duggan the white guy elected by right in votes right in he kind of went house to house you know in the town of 75 percent black he's just so good and i called him and said how are you doing with the unrest and violence in the stores and he said jamie our economy is terrible you know they unemployment way back up again it'd come way down he said but there's none of that here i said why not i'm trying to get the press to write this he said you know he said because the police here already had a very good relays with the community you know i guess community type police and stuff like that and the black community kept out the out-of-town agitators they didn't want him in they said you're not doing that to our town yeah and so detroit hasn't had all these problems which i find kind of amazing and maybe a great lesson to all of us too that's great that's great so one of the things i know that you are and that's and thank you for that that like i said the comprehensive strategy is super key and one of the pieces i think of that strategy is i know that you are invested you and the firm are pretty heavily invested in leadership development which is is our core mission right leadership development in our case for latino leaders tell me a little bit about the fellowship initiative i know that's something that you all are pretty proud of yeah so that started because someone had this idea that let's take a troubled set there's all men but latinx and black uh that kids are like in ninth and tenth grade who by most measures aren't going to get through high school okay can we get them not just through high school but into college and not just into college but out of college and some will go back to communities and so we started small i think with 10 kids or something in in la or something like that and that we're doing it now in south bronx we've now put i'm going to say 300 kids to the program but in those those years 10th grade 11th grade 12th grade mentoring apprenticeships training so our own people taking new weekends you know taking these kids under their wings and you listen to some of these kids there obviously there's stories some terrible stories about their families and crime and violence uh almost 95 percent have gotten to college and out wow they're getting scot a couple of scholarships from princeton of all places you know and and i've been to a couple of the graduations and the parents i mean everyone's crying right that they didn't expect these kids some will tell you they didn't expect to live to 18 right and so it works and and this is a really important thing if you can if it really really works we call it the fellowship initiation not the jp morgan fellowship initiative because we want to invite other people to do the same thing okay and they can take our learning so that you know if we can if we could do 20 people at south bronx and maybe in other countries just 20 people south products no there's 20 in south bronx then you start to bend that curve you know you're going to make a huge difference and one of those kids is going to go back and start a business and as you know i would tell among all these kids who might not have gotten through high school there might be a barack obama there might be an albert einstein there might be a jeff bezos there might be someone who can change the world a little bit and so you know we then you get the best out of all of our citizens what do you think is the most of the many things you you've described what do you think is the most effective thing that that jpmc is doing with the latino community right now and what would you say is the most crucial thing that you all still need to tackle so i think i mean that we always look at you is there are three things okay one is what we do here for own people and that we're doing quite well we're trained we have we know because we're global you know we have a lot of people who run parts of this company who are hispanic argentinians spanish like uh so that i think we're doing fine i think we've already spoken about um you know the very specific stuff that jp moore is is talking about but i think the most important and this thing goes to a corporate social responsibility like what is it and honestly ceos don't wake up then when we think about children i think about customers employees and communities so you think of communities two ways one is micro which most we've been speaking about which is how can you help that community but it's no different than if you own a corner bakery store that you give your food away to a homeless shelter at the end of the day that you might hire kid in the summer that you support a local religious institution the local little league that you take the ice off the front so some little layers of break or like that's community yeah you know if a whole town does that that's a nicer town than the town that doesn't do that but there's a broader sense of community which i'm going to say and it's much more complicated like how do you help policy so for example if policy was done right i think america would be going a lot faster if america was growing a lot faster that would lift up everybody and it would also give this the country the wherewithal you have more jobs better paying jobs you'd have wage inflation low end you'd have all these various things and the country be richer and you can afford better social safety nets and all these various things that's the one we screwed up the most so if you ask me what's going to help our society the most get policy right health care immigration taxation regulation most about small business that does small businesses uh uh infrastructure i mean we can't get infrastructure built probably in this country education inner city schools and by every one of these would ed would add a lot to growth immigration people think that by the the a lot of you in congress had bills that you know the democrats had voted for that i think the schumer mccain bill that gave a path to citizenship to the undocumented which most of the law buying undocumented most americans want obviously daca but immigration has been critical to america's success yeah and you know and a lot and obviously the latino groups know this but that would add 0.3 to our growth if we did it right yes yes you know and it's amazing to me that we can't get it past the last time at immigration reform was 1986 and so you know and now you have a lot of democrats rubs who want to do it and so all of these things are hurting our country tearing it apart slowing down growth reducing opportunity uh and then you know then you can have very special programs aid they're really disadvantaged yeah but but for god's sakes you know we have to have an agenda and policies that actually work that do well for everybody great great one last question and we're almost at time um uh again given that we're developing leaders and again as people often point to you as one of the most effective leaders that they've uh worked with or encountered what's one piece of advice one kind of tip that you would give to a rising professional who's trying to make their way in whatever field who wants to achieve that kind of level of leadership in effect you spend your whole life learning learn learn learn learn learn it's not just cool like every professional is always learning listen to the other side read other people if you're a democrat read george will understand why libertarians think the way they do or why and if you're a a republican you know read tom friedman or read you know people who are saying why our job is lift up society like have a little respect and appreciation not just knee-jerk reactions to stuff earn you respect and trust every day from people like every interaction and things like that uh treat everyone with respect uh and you know i look i think part of you the goal in life is to be is to have purpose you know it's not how much money you die with it's purpose and did you make the world a better place while you were here uh uh and i think when you have purpose you also have more happiness so that's great that's great well thank you so much for being here with us ladies and gentlemen jamie dimon it's been a real pleasure uh uh to have you here with us and we look forward to continuing to work with you and to learn from all your wisdom marco thank you it was a pleasure

Channel: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute

Views: 35,194

Keywords: Hispanic, Latino, Leadership

Id: AUs0JFY57Wc

Length: 25min 58sec (1558 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020