Chase CEO gives sharp talk at DU

David Milstead, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 6, 2007 at midnight

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Do not expect the typical executive blather from Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO.

His reputation for sharp talk is matched by his reputation for leadership first at Citigroup, then at Bank One, which merged with JPMorgan Chase in 2004.

Dimon, who rose to the CEO job in 2006, was in Denver on Thursday and Friday to meet with Colorado bank staff and local leaders. On Friday, he appeared at the University of Denver's Voices of Experience.

Highlights

On how he explained to employees the demotion of a well-liked executive:

Joe was a wonderful person, a pillar of society. He trained a lot of people, but he wasn't doing the job anymore. If I had been loyal to Joe, who would I have been disloyal to? Everybody else. Meritocracy. Fairness. You name it. I always tell employees: 'Don't be loyal to me, be loyal to the company.' . . . If you're in a job you don't do well, we put you back in another job you do do well - we don't fire you. That's loyalty.

On JPMorgan Chase in Colorado and how it's grown since he took over as Bank One CEO:

We hadn't opened a branch, ever, and the employees said, 'We want to do x, y. We want to open a branch,' and I said, 'OK, open a branch.' And they said, 'Really?' And I said, 'Yeah, I'm the boss.' We were at 30, we're up to 80 and we'll be over 100 in another 18 months. This state is growing, and we'll grow with it. (Colorado President Todd Munson and head of retail Steve Shaffer) collaborate without me having to write a memo saying 'let's collaborate.'

On what happened when he found out, more than a year after he took over as CEO of Bank One, that the bank's retail operating hours were two hours shorter than its competitors in a key market.

I heard, 'Oh we've always done it this way; we're different,' and I said, 'We're going to be open the same hours they are. We're going to do it. No studies, no McKinsey, it's done. You can't be open two hours less than your competitors. If they go 2 4/7, we're going 2 4/7.'

On CEO pay and income inequality:

I think it's terribly naive to say that's too much money for a CEO, but it's OK for an athlete or an entertainer to make $20 million or $30 million. Why is that different? And then there are people who say somehow boards of directors paying CEOs is a rigged market. I can go somewhere else and get this money like that. If you think there's not a real demand for CEOs - it's really hard to get people to run these companies. If I owned all of JPMorgan Chase, I'd pay someone an awful lot of money to run it for me.

That being said, I don't think having a highly inequitable society is a good thing. I'm making a political statement. When Dick Cheney said the tax cuts aren't a moral issue? It is a moral issue. You're going to send 2,000 kids a year to die, and you're going to send $2 million more to me? We could've sent people $2,000 back in their paychecks, but we didn't. So I'm personally happy to pay more taxes. I have to explain this to my Republican friends: You were blessed to be born here, you could have been born over in Bangladesh, and you'd be nothing. Why don't we give the money to the families of the boys who died at Omaha Beach (in World War II)? They built everything.

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