At a Harvard Business School event, Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase, spoke about career management, leadership, and societal Obligations. He emphasized the importance of lifelong learning, building a personal brand, and dealing with failure effectively. Sharing his experiences, Dimon discussed the significance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence in achieving personal success and maintaining work-life balance.

Dimon also focused on leadership, describing it as a privilege with deep responsibilities. He highlighted the necessity of discipline, Fortitude, and maintaining Integrity in leadership roles. Through anecdotes and personal reflections, he explained how true leadership involves encouraging open communication, authenticity, and prioritizing the success of the broader team over individual gains. Dimon underscored these points with experiences from his own career, illustrating how effective leadership can contribute to organizational health and employee morale.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. Transformational [ˌtrænsfərˈmeɪʃənəl] - (adj.) - Relating to a marked change in form, nature, or appearance.

...Harvard Business School class of 1982, met here and had a Transformational experience...

2. Obligation [ˌɒblɪˈɡeɪʃən] - (n.) - A duty or commitment one is bound to perform.

...it does come with some very, very deep Obligations I'm going to talk about a little bit later.

3. Fortitude [ˈfɔːrtɪtjuːd] - (n.) - Courage in facing difficulties or adversity.

You have to have great Fortitude. I don't know who wrote the book, but they talked about fierce resolve.

4. Meritocracy [ˌmerɪˈtɒkrəsi] - (n.) - A system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement.

But if you are loyal to Joe and not the company, you do not have a Meritocracy.

5. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) [ɪˈmoʊʃənl ɪnˈtɛlɪdʒəns] - (n.) - The ability to understand and manage your own emotions, and recognize and influence the emotions of others.

...where people often fall short. It's on the Eq.

6. Bureaucracy [bjʊˈrɒkrəsi] - (n.) - A system of government or management involving a complex set of rules and regulations, typically seen as inefficient.

I think that Bureaucracy is the petri dish of politics.

7. Vibrant [ˈvaɪbrənt] - (adj.) - Full of energy and life.

I am devoted to making JP Morgan a healthy, vibrant company.

8. Accountability [əˌkaʊntəˈbɪlɪti] - (n.) - The fact or condition of being responsible for one's actions.

I remind people, the best that I could do, I think, is hold myself accountable.

9. Integrity [ɪnˈteɡrɪti] - (n.) - The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.

Give the customer a great deal... involves fairness and Integrity.

10. Stakeholder [ˈsteɪkˌhoʊldər] - (n.) - A person or group with an interest or concern in a business.

The decisions made will impact not only stakeholders but the greater community as well.

Leadership Lessons: From Business Giants to Personal Heroes

We're very pleased to have you here on our campus for a very special two days for someone we know is very special to you. I also have a special welcome to two very important guests, Jamie and Judy Dimon. Jamie up here on stage with me, Judy in the front row, Harvard Business School class of 1982, met here and had a Transformational experience and have been together as part of that Transformational experience ever since. We're thrilled to have you back. And we'll hear from Jamie later on. One of the leaders of an American institution that has truly shown he's a leader who makes a difference in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our 2009 classic speaker, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Mister Jamie Dimon.

Thank you very much. I just want to make it absolutely clear, I left Citigroup ten years ago. Okay. So good afternoon, everybody. Section, I thank you. You know, I was listening to you guys talk about your school experience when you first got here. Legos and bean bags and stuff like that. Sounded more like kindergarten to me. We didn't have any of that stuff. We were right down to business. And Dean Light, Joe Bataracco, they were both teachers of mine, by the way, fabulous and outstanding teachers. Joe Bataracco, by the way, I know he's very good. I know he ranks very high when you score him every year. But the year that I was here was his first year and we taught him how to teach. I'm sure you all had some first-year teachers and you can torture them just a little bit. Parents, friends, HBS graduates.

We're very proud of you. My wife and I both graduated from here and we both loved it here. And my daughter Julia and her now fiance, as of last Sunday, are both coming here next year. So I know they'll enjoy as much as we did. It is a well-earned, you should feel great about graduating this school. It is well-earned. It's not just the two years here. It's years of hard work. It does come with some very, very deep Obligations I'm going to talk about a little bit later.

I'm actually going to stick to exactly what you all asked me to speak about. Three subjects. One was career management, learning, dealing with failure, building your brand. It was put in the piece of paper. I got family and things like that. The second is leadership, quasi leadership. What's important, and particularly lessons in a crisis. And the third is our Obligations to society and each other. I'm going to caution you and I'm going to go through a bunch of things here. I'm always hesitant to give advice because it sounds like I did it all right. I did not. Some what I'm going to tell you is I learned from making the mistakes that I'm going to tell you to try to avoid doing. And some are timeless principles. I'm sure a lot of the parents here will know them quite well.

Career management. And this is individual. Whether you're an individual leader or a leader of a group, an individual contributor, you're responsible for your own success and happiness. There are six very important things I think you've got to focus on. Learning is a lifelong thing. It doesn't end at Harvard Business School. It's your responsibility. I think if you're in any profession at all, you have to do it consistently all the time. I think I spend probably 50 or 60% of my time learning, reading, talking to people, traveling. It's the only way you can keep on top of this global world of ours. And it's even tougher now because of the globality of the businesses you're all going to deal in how reading is the most important one. But the second one, which is often forgotten, is talking to other people. You can learn more from speaking to people in 15 minutes than if you spent your life doing something. They can explain it to you. And you can learn from watching people.

You also are going to learn by. I'm going to call it imitation, but by watching other very good people and how they operate in difficult circumstances. I learned a lot of things what not to do and a lot of things what to do by watching other people. Number two, building your brand. That's a Harvard business school way to put it. But let me put it a slightly different way. There is already a book on you. That book is already being written. And if I spoke to your teachers, your friends, your professionals, your parents, I would know whether you're trusted, how hard you work, whether you're ethical. I would know so much about you, you'd be shocked. I don't even have to meet you. So that book is already growing. You should. You write the book. You want the way to be written. You actually have that choice, and you can do it as you want now. Don't let others write it.

And when you get caught in situations that you're uncomfortable, I remember I worked at a company not far from here, and I remember I was asked to do something I didn't want to do. I'm not telling you all, take this advice. You can always quit. It's your responsibility whether you accept to do something or not. And it will be in that book written on you three. How do you deal with failure, making mistakes? Many of you already have dealt with some very difficult times, so this is no different than some of you already dealt with. When you fail, it's okay to get depressed. It's okay to cry. It's okay to go home. It's okay to blame others for a while, but eventually you have to get over it and move on.

The greatest people have ever walked this planet, and I'm talking, I'm not talking about business people. I'm talking about people like Nelson Mandela and Abe Lincoln constantly had setbacks in life and failures constantly. It happens all the time in business. And some of your success will be how you deal with the failure, not how you deal with the success. When I get introduced, I always get introduced that 1998, I was the president of Citigroup, and in 2000 I took over Bank One. I was fired in 1998. So I went a little bit of experience like this, and it's a painful thing. My boss, who had worked for 15 years, called me in and said, we want you to resign. To which I said, okay. I went home. I told my wife and children, I called my wife up and said, Judy, I'm going to tell you something. I'm not kidding because I always make jokes about things like that.

But I wanted to make sure the kids were fine. I went home. I had three wonderful daughters. They were much younger then. I said. The youngest one said, dad, do we have to sleep in the streets? I said, no, hon, we're okay. The middle one, who just graduated Barnard, said, dad, can I still go to college? I said, yes, dear, you can. And I knew things were fine when the oldest one, who was going to Harvard Business School, said, dad, can I have that little cell phone you have? You won't be needing it. I remind people, when you fail at something, it's your. I told people about Citicorp is my net worth, not my self worth. And I was able to move on. And yes, it was difficult.

I did call my boss a year later. He did not call me. I called him and said, it's time to break bread. We went to lunch together. I told him I didn't think he did the right thing for Citicorp, which is pretty obvious at this point. But I told him the mistakes I made and whether it was 40 60 or 60 40 wasn't important. I wanted to learn from the experience and move on. He acknowledged my mistakes. You had better be a little tough in this world of ours because you will be criticized when you take jobs of leadership and almost any job. And so you have to grow a little bit of a thick skin.

At one point, when Secretary Hank Paulson, secretary of treasury of the United States, was getting a lot of criticism and Tim Geithner about some of the things they were doing in a very difficult environment, I called them up and read them a teddy Roosevelt quote, which I hope you should all remember, or took all the students here. And it was something like the, that the credit does not go to the critic in the stand. It goes to the person on the field, bloodied and bruised, striving to achieve something. And I think that that's very true. So that when you get the criticism, let it go off your back. And I think we should remind ourselves, when it comes to mistakes, a lot of what's going to happen the next 25 years to you. It's not just your skill. There's luck involved.

So don't get too Exuberant when you do well, and don't get too depressed when you don't. Number four, to thine own self be true. You have to fight self deception. We are human beings are experts at it. I do it all the time. It's one of my favorite things to do until people bring me back to earth very often. Who brings you back to earth very often? It's your friends or your spouse. We all do the same kind of thing with friends and spouses. We come home, we tell them how we were treated and why that person treated us so badly, and they agree with us. So it's very important you try to step out of those situations and try to undo yourself deeply.

I'm going to give you two examples. This is more personal. It may relate to some of you here about myself. When I was in fifth grade, my teacher made a sign that said self control, and she put it on the desk facing me. That went on for many, many years. And it wasn't until I was 45 years old that I realized that anger is a bad thing. And that people used to say, when I was younger, that was a well placed blow of anger, well timed and well delivered. It was never deliberate. It was just a welling up of anger. Usually, I had to apologize. In fact, at one point, someone gave me a box of cards, which all I had to do was fill in the day, and the card said, hello, my name is Jamie Dimon. I like to apologize in advance for my behavior on the day of XDev. And so anger always backfires.

It hurts people. You have to apologize all the time, it's better to skip it. You all know about IQ and EQ. Your iqs are all high enough to be very successful, where people often fall short. It's on the Eq. And emotional intelligence is critical and it's something you will develop over time, too. Matter of fact, a lot of management skills are more Eq. How do people function? And when I look at EQ, I always think to myself, why is it that when some people walk in a room, we all brighten up? Why is it when you really want advice, you call certain people? Why is it that some people, you never would question what they say and that some people, you never would trust what they say?

And those are emotional skills and empathy and. But you're a human being. You have these other things which we all have to develop all the time and work at them all the time. And there are things like passion, work ethic, character, Integrity. And you're the sum of all of these things. Your IQ alone will not get you through the dark days or the tough times. You need to develop all these things to develop them consistently. Take care of yourself, your family and your friends. You're going to get involved in very high stressful situations. If you don't take care of yourself physically and emotionally, you will fail. You have to do it. I used to feel guilty when I get in the office late, sometimes late being 830 to nine, because I stayed to exercise.

Exercise is a good thing. It clears your mind. You have to give yourself vacations and family time all the time. One example I had, I went on vacation many years ago. Like a lot of you. I played tennis in the morning with friends, I ran the afternoon. We had dinner with friends. And my kids were kind of ignoring me that whole vacation. And the next vacation I said, no, I'm going to go. I'm going to spend only with the kids. Nothing else. No friends, no tennis. And it's amazing how much fun you have and how much time you play with them. There's no such thing as quality time without quantity. So when you have children, don't think you can make up for with short briefs of quantity time. They won't get there with you.

Leadership issue number two. First of all, it is an honor, a privilege and a very deep responsibility to be a leader of a small group or a bigger group. You have to remind yourself if you make a mistake, and I worry about this all the time, I can hurt a lot of people. And I'm not talking about just shareholders. I'm talking about customers, communities, employees, parents, we have to lay off people. So that's what I worry about every single day. It is personal. I hear all the time that people say, it's not personal, it's just business. It is personal.

I want to do a great job for this company, this team. I bleed JP Morgan blood. I don't like it when people act. I see this all the time, like it's a third party they're talking about. It is not a third party. I wear the jersey of this company. I want patriots. I want people going to fight for it and do the right thing all the time. Do what? It's not what you say. I'm going to say a lot of things here. It's actually what you do. So everything I'm about to say, it's whether you actually demonstrate it in your life, not whether you put it down on paper.

I'm going to go through eleven attributes. The attributes are intertwined. You can come up with different names in different ways. The only difference in a crisis, by the way, is which ones are more important. The balance changes. But you need all of these to do a very good job. As a leader, you have to be very disciplined. I was not that disciplined. I didn't work as hard as my wife here and I was a little lazy. But when I started working, you have to be disciplined. Discipline is rigorous, detailed meetings. You do it consistently. You have to have a work ethic. It's like exercising or weeding the garden. You don't get there and stop and the competition is always coming down. Is continuous improvement. You have to always be striving for improvement.

Discipline in a crisis, by the way, we would go from once a week risk meeting to three times a day, and from, you know, 10-hour days to 20 hours days. That was the only difference. But the process I'm going to talk about a little bit is the same. You have to have great Fortitude. I don't know who wrote the book, but they talked about fierce resolve. You have to have Fortitude and the ability to act. You can be crippled by politics, Bureaucracy and people who just don't want change. When I first got to bank one, it was quickly clear to me the company had systems problems, management problems. We didn't treat our customers well, our expenses were too high. And to survive and thrive, we had to lay up a lot of people. The board didn't want to make the changes, the management didn't want to make the change. As a matter of fact, the management said, wasn't my fault. I don't know who else's fault it was.

You have to push back against it. At one point, I cut the size of the board. I went to the management team. We cut 100% of their bonuses the first year. We took away their pension plans, their cars, their clubs. I made a lot of them. Go with me to every site. We're laying off people and say we're sorry that we put you in a position that we have to lay off people. At this company, you have to have the ability to act. You've got to make a list of what it is and then get it done. Yes. Orchestrate it, coordinate it. Don't do it in haste. Think it through, because that will backfire, too. But for the most part, people simply don't do what needs to be done. You have to set standards. Standards are not set by Harvard Business School.

They're not set by the federal governments of the world. They're not set by anybody. Not set by industries. They're set by you. There are two types of standards you have to set. First one is performance. If you want to really be good, you have to say it. You have to say, we want to be good, and we strive to be among the best. You have to compare yourself to the best. A lot of companies I go to, when we compare ourselves, they always drop the best company. I always say, why is that? They say, the best company is different. They don't really compete in the same business. I say, yeah, they're different, they're good. Put the best up there at a very detailed level and say, we want to do it.

Analyze why you're different. That includes in performance. Give the customer a great deal. If you're not giving the customer a good deal, you're going to lose. Someone once said, things come to those who wait. Abe Lincoln added, yes, but only those things that are left by those who hustle. You have to set standards of performance or you will fail. The second is standards of Integrity. I know. You talk about it and you'll learn it. Treat people the way you would treat your parents. That's all. Tell them of the product, tell them the service. When they come in the door, say, what can I do for you? My parents were here.

They'd say, you should be treating me a little bit better, Jamie, but set the standards of Integrity. It's not embedded in anything. A lot of you worked at companies where people said things. I think it's a code word, is don't worry about it. Everyone does it that way. No, they don't. No, they do not. And, you know, set that standard. And that standard's got to be set at a very all across all levels. I've been with a lot of kids who lie in T&E's because they took a cab in. They shared it from the hotel to a job interview. They split up the friend, and they both put in 100% of the cab bill of dollar 40. That's stealing. If I caught you doing that, I'd fire you. And everyone in the company knows that that is stealing.

And so the standard is set across the board, from little things to big things. Do the right thing, not the easy or expedient thing. Fourth, you got to look at the facts in a cold-blooded, honest way all the time. At management meetings, emphasize the negatives. You can always have a party about the positives. I used to always go to Hong Kong, party, have a great time. But at management meetings, what are we not doing? Well, how come the competition is doing better? Emphasize the negatives internally, P&L statements are very important. Okay. And so a lot of times I get involved in debates about, well, you're focused on little things, about how we allocate expenses. It's not a little thing. A lot of companies allocate expenses inside and the allocation is political, not economic.

And that does two things inside a company. It means your numbers aren't honest. In fact, I've been at a company where people say, well, let's move the profits to the part of the company that has a higher public valuation. I call that financial misrepresentation. You're teaching your own people to lie, and that goes on in these companies. So P&Ls are very important that way. Aggressive accounting is the same thing. I'm not going to go through a lot of examples. I don't know if you saw that GE case and the Westinghouse case compares to. Did you still do that one? That compares accounting. When people do very aggressive accounting, it's in one spot. It's usually a lot of spots.

It tells you something about the company, so keep your eye out for that one. Externally, full disclosure, there's only one truth. We try to tell the board the same thing. We tell the employees the same thing. We tell the analyst the same thing. We tell our employees the good, the bad and the ugly, and then deal with it. It's okay. We're never going to do anything exactly right. Number five, openness. Hard one to actually execute, because what you really want, a company, is full sharing of information. I've worked with a lot of companies where you can't simply can't get it. You know, they say it's not your job, it is your job. We want to have full information and then have a debate about the right thing to do. Half the debates are on what the information is.

Bad information leads to excessive politics. People have often said to me, okay, Jamie, you're the big boss. You get paid the big bucks to decide now. Decide to. My experience has always been that if you get the right people in the room, the answer is often waiting to be found. You don't have to guess. The job of a leader is not to make the decision, is to make sure the best decision is made. And therefore you need other people. You have to kill Bureaucracy. I think that Bureaucracy is the petri dish of politics. It pushes out good people. You lose touch with your customers. It often emanates from headquarters.

If you go to headquarters of companies, I think headquarters are often a disease and you see the receptionist treating the employees badly or their customers badly, you probably have a company that has a problem. Headquarters don't exist except the fact there's a client in front of someone somewhere, whether it's a Benihana or whether it's a JP Morgan Chase, and you got to deal Home Depot. The best example is they call store support center. I'm more of that. Mine move people in and out of corporate to make sure they know. It's like they have the job on the firing line and then they have a little more respect for the job in the firing line. Deal with key issues. I always make a list on Sunday of all the issues I'm trying to avoid, and I write them down and I try to deal with them on Monday. Now, I avoid them half the time. Good reason is not to do it, but I try to get them down.

There are signs of politics when you see these. I'm sure you've all seen them. When you have a meeting, you share information, and after the meeting, people line up outside of your office saying, I didn't want to say this in front of everybody, but that's politics. Now, of course, they can tell you something confidential, but most of the time it should have been said in the room with their partners. And I tend to tell people, you can't say in the room, you don't deserve the job. Say it politely, say it reasonably, but say it because you're only trying to do the right thing for the company or the clients. One point, we had a conversation about compensation. We actually reviewed the top compensation a lot of people, and someone said, you're going to make us all go through all the compensation of all the top people. I said, yes, I am.

And the person said, well, don't they work for me? Don't I know what they contribute to the company? I said, no, they don't work for you. And how do you know they contributed to the company? Unless you ask your partners, and we have open conversations about whether our people doing a good job for each other, we don't do it to hurt anyone. We do it for fairness and insight and get into the field. Whatever people say, get into the field. Do it all the time. Have a little fun. Take the ops clerk to dinner. Go have drinks with the tellers. You'll learn more about your company all the time.

You do something like that. Cut across hierarchy. When you're in companies, that hierarchy is another disease. Be polite. But hierarchy is generally artificial to start with. Most units and companies all serve each other. And so cut across the hierarchy. Just make sure your boss doesn't fire you for it. Always get the right people in the room. If you're designing a system, have the people going to use the system there. Give them the authority to say, if it doesn't work for you, the tellers or the clerks, then we won't do it. So they get fully engaged in building everything that the company does all the time.

And the last thing to open is, someone said to me once, there's truth tellers. Someone stood up in a big crowd and said, every one of you has to make sure that at least one of the people around you is a truth teller. They always tell you the truth. And I got up and said, yes, you got to make sure that there's at least one truth teller around you. But if you are a leader and you have seven or eight people reporting to you and you have only one truth teller, you have a problem. Every single one of them should be a truth teller. You have to set things up for success.

I'll give you a quick example from my past. When we did the Citigroup travelers deal, we had multiple tri heads and multiple co heads reporting to triheads and co heads. That is a formula for disaster. So organize things that will actually work in the future, not things that won't work in the future. Loyalty number seven. Loyalty, Meritocracy, and teamwork, words you all hear. I'm going to give you a slightly different point of view of them. When I was a young CEO, someone asked me, we love the company. But you demoted Joe. You embarrassed him. How can we be loyal to you? Which we asked for, which I believe in when we're not loyal to Joe. And I honestly couldn't answer the question.

I went home that night and I thought about it and I called the person up the next night and said, yes, you were right. We demoted Joe. And Joe is a pillar of society and a wonderful person. And yes, we did not want to embarrass him, but Joe was no longer doing a good job. If we were loyal to Joe by leaving him in that job, we would have been hugely disloyal to everybody else and the clients of the company. And that, by the way, is the hardest job you are going to face right there, doing the right thing when it may be removed.

Don't embarrass someone. I think it's one of the great mistakes when people embarrass people all the time publicly, who worked hard for a company. That is a terrible thing to do. If you, if you are loyal to Joe and not the company, you do not have a Meritocracy. I remind people, we talk about diversity. Joe is usually a middle-aged white guy. So if I tell you we're going to give the best job to the best person, okay, I'm not telling the truth. If you don't see me make changes. So a Meritocracy is the fundamental part of a Meritocracy.

And teamwork. Teamwork is often code and it means get along. Whereas often I think the best team player is the one who puts up their hand and says, I don't agree because I don't think what you're doing is in the best interest of the client or the company. So teamwork sometimes means standing alone and having the courage to say something. I deeply believe in loyalty, deeply. And I dealt hard with a contradiction about making tough decisions like that. So what is loyalty? If you deeply believe in it, what do we owe employees of a company and each other? Here's what we owe you. We owe you.

I'm going to talk about this a little later. That we're going to build, do everything we can to build a healthy and vibrant company, because that will give you the most opportunity. We want to build a company that's respected by people because that means you will be respected. We want to give you the training you need. We want to treat you with dignity. We want to give you opportunities. If you fall down, we want to pick you up and help you. That's what we owe you. We do not owe you that job. And that is what loyalty means. Number eight, great mistakes made in the name of morale.

Very often morale the people means writing down words. We're going to treat people with dignity and loyalty. We're going to do all these wonderful things. We're going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya, the road to hell of pays with good intentions. One of my first jobs, I was at a company I'm going named that had a terrible morale problem. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in a survey to ask what you know to check into morale. I of course, being a little obnoxious at my young age, said, I could have saved you the money and told you morale was bad. Now morale was bad because people consider the place political and bureaucratic, self-defined.

The management team came up with an idea. The idea was, and they convinced themselves it was a great idea, that it gave every employee $300 of restricted stock to show that they care and to give them a vested interest in the company. They gave out the $300 of restricted stock. Months later, they surveyed morale again. It got worse. And I'm going to make a very simple common sense example on why it got worse. And this is business is just common sense. Sometimes if you walk up to me and say, Jamie, your company is political and bureaucratic, I don't like working here.

I would never recommend to have a friend come here. I look back and say, oh yeah, well, here's $300. What you want us to do is fix the problem. We can't buy your loyalty and we certainly can't buy your morale. Morale comes from fixing problems, earning respect and winning. I always remind people, show me a very bad company that loses all the time, I'll show you bad morale. Number nine, treat all people properly, with respect. Treat them all the same, whether they're clerks or CEO's. I find it very upsetting. Someone's mentioned, yes, Jamie, that's true.

But you treat them all badly sometimes, but don't treat them well, but treat them equally. Everyone serves everyone else in a company, from that receptionist to that teller to the ops person. And we should always acknowledge that we serve people. If we don't return our phone calls, they're not going to return theirs. So I always remind myself that anything I'm doing for Soan is because they have a client in front of them. Promote people who are respected. Ask yourself a question. You promote people. Would you have your child work for that person? Because half the time we promote people, we would not let our kid work for them. And you should really question about why you would allow something like that.

Number ten, this is one of the hot topics. Get compensation, right? So get the incentives right, build the P&L is right, get the incentives right. But I always remind people at our company, I don't care what the P&L says or what the incentive system says. Do the right thing for the client anyway. That's never an excuse for bad behaviors. Companies, even big companies, we need entrepreneurs. So we have to accommodate thoroughbreds. People want to make money innovators. And so we have to make sure we have that inside our company all the time, too. To get compensation right, you have to acknowledge that failure is okay.

We want people to fail. I think they're good mistakes. You know, you argued it, you thought it through, you, you talked to the right people and you were wrong. And so you have to allow failure compensation. A little bit of a partnership. Internal fairness is often far more important than anything else that takes place. Performance is hard to judge all this thing about. Somehow we should have an easy job judging performance. When we judge people's performance, we don't just look at that P&L. That financial statement is a snapshot of a point in time that's based upon decisions and actions taken by a lot of people over 10 years.

We look at, did you work hard? Did you hire people? Did you train people? Did you do the right thing for the client? Do you help other people? Did you build systems? When we ask you to do something like recruit, did you help us or do you not show up at some of these recruiting sessions? So we judge the full spectrum of how people perform and then the greatest misconceptions all is when a unit doesn't perform. Don't blame the boss. I mean, don't pay the boss well. Sometimes you want to give your best person the worst job. I've asked a lot of people to go do a job that I know is going to be the hardest turnaround, the meanest job 24/7 that they're not going to look good doing it.

And, you know, I say to them, I'm going to pay you the same as the rest of your partners and I've got your back. I'm not going to allow the politics inside hurt you. If something goes wrong, we're all going to get an airplane and come help you. Very often in companies where there's a problem, people go running as far and fast as they can in the opposite direction. Whereas when we have problems, we want the good people to run us to say, I can help. And we often protect them on camp when they do something like that. Performance also deeply always ask this question, has to look at the rising tide and the cycles. Don't let that fool you. Allow you to a false sense of security.

And that's some of what happened in this crisis of ours, which I'm not going to go through here. The CEO is the captain of the ship. When CEO's are hired, sometimes they have a guarantee or a buyout or something like that. I think it's very short. That's okay. When I got to bank one, I had a one-year guarantee. I'd hired a bunch of people. One point of the year they came to see me and said, Jamie, we can't do the job. They'd get one-year guarantees too. I've almost never hired someone for more money, a multi-year guarantee or a bigger job.

I don't bribe people to join the company. If I have to bribe you, I don't want you. You want to come build a great company, love to have you here. They came to see me and said, we're not going to take our guaranteed pay because we can't do what we have to do and travel around and make these tough decisions. And as they're walking out they looked back at me and said, and by the way, we don't think you should take yours either. And I think they were exactly right at one point. You're the captain of the ship and it doesn't matter anything other than you've got to say, I'm part of the ship and I will be paid with it or not. You should be the first to pay a price.

Number eleven, have real Humility. Humility, by the way, is not a people that say, Jamie, you don't sound a lot very humble very often. Humility is a deep acknowledgement that we got here by the dint of sometimes where we were born, who our parents were, it wasn't all our genius and brains. Maybe we could have been in a different place with a disease that we couldn't handle. You will have awesome power that affects people's lives. Use it wisely and be just on it. If you do all this in leadership, you can end up with a mature company.

And one of the great lessons I learned, there's a book about everything you want about management you learn in Shakespeare. I don't know if you guys teach that here, but it's true. I look at some of these companies and they're more like shakespearean tragedies that you don't teach at Harvard Business School, where neuroses in politics dominates internally. Read King Lear. That's what it looks like to me half the time. And what you want is a mature company and the mature companies, and I can name some Walgreens, Toyota, Tada, Nokia. I go around the whole and every business.

They're constantly getting better, they're constantly getting good people. They always do the right thing, they always focus on the customer. It's not constance derm and dring. When they change CEO's, the company doesn't blow up five years later. You want a mature company, not a shakespearean tragedy. Third, your Obligations, our Obligations to our companies and our societies, some of these are my values, so you may very well disagree. That's fine. First of all, you are very lucky. We should all acknowledge that Warren Buffett always gives an example of a barrel, that there are almost 7 billion people on this planet and that, you know, most of the people on this planet, if they can take where they are or stick their hand in and be somebody else, would stick their hand and be somebody else. You can have in the United States.

If we open the doors, we might have 3 billion people who want to come here. We are very lucky. A lot of what we're good at, we were born with, and that gives us a deep Obligations. Leaders understand that they didn't build this country. I speak to a lot of my friends. I remind them they didn't charge the beach at Normandy or do the Humvee in a desert in Iran or a mountain Iraq. So everything they earned, they did not earn it on their own. Somebody earned it before they got here. And that should be a humbling thing for all leaders.

If you want to be a leader, it can't be about money and it can't be about you. It's about eventually what you do, what you leave behind, and what you did when you walked the planet, teachers, politicians, scientists, generals, left this planet better than us. And someone said, I'll tell you what I think about it, said, what would you want in your tombstone? Think about that when you become a leader, what do you want in your tombstone? So here are three of the important things to me. I was asked once in China by a reporter, what's really important to you? And I started talking about the company.

I said, no, no. What's important to you as a person? And I said, in this order, my family, humanity, my country, somewhere down here, JP Morgan. And I do mean that in that order. And I'm going to explain why. The family you brought into this world, the people who love you the most, and you love the most, I've already spoken about giving them time. The only advice I'm going to give you family at all, or friends. And this is more to the men than to the women here. Turn off the TV.

You don't have to have dinner with your buddies all the time. Your vacations belong to your family. Your weekends belong to your family. You got to do that or you will lose them. And the reason I devote all my time to my family is because as you all know, your kids eventually don't want to see you anymore either. And they all go have their own purpose in life. So I tell people, the best that I could do, the best that I could do, I think, is build this company. I run as best as I can and it's the best I can do for the country and for humanity.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I am devoted to making JP Morgan a healthy, vibrant company. And people ask me, what's the most important thing to you? Making this company healthy and vibrant. I will make enormous sacrifice to do that. Because if I don't do that, I'm hurting our employees, our customers, our families, our communities. We are a very charitable company. We give away $100 million a year. We pay for our vets when they go over, when they're called back to duty overseas, we pay their full salary. We invented ATM's for the blind.

We teach inner city school kids. When the hurricane, the tsunami, the earthquake hit, we immediately sent money and aid. And I speak for a lot of companies. We are a very good company, but it is all predicated on being healthy and vibrant. And sometimes people forget that and they let the company become sick and then you're hurting all these things. So I spend a lot of my time making sure we can do all these wonderful things by making sure the company is healthy and vibrant. Finally, humanity and country, we're going to get through this crisis. So I'm not going to talk at all about the crisis.

And I think America is a great. I'm wildly optimistic about the future of America. It is still one of the shining lights on this planet. It has been and it will continue to be. But I am deeply troubled by the notion that success is a given. It is not a given. And this country has a lot of things it has to do. And policy, policy is something that you're all going to have to start to work on to make sure we do things right all the time to serve humanity.

And I'm talking about America, but I think it applies to all countries. We all need to do things that make the planet better. In the United States, for example, we have had our third energy crisis, which is an environmental crisis. The reason we have it is we do not have the Fortitude to make decisions that other countries made a long time ago to tax energy. We come up with a lot of things that aren't going to work. And the one thing that will work, we won't do because we don't have the Fortitude. We in the United States of America that I know is true for countries around the world. Half of the kids who graduate inner city schools, half of the kids in inter city schools don't graduate high school.

That is a disgrace and embarrassment which we're going to have to work hard to fix. So I remind people that it's okay to share the wealth. I don't mind paying taxes. I wouldn't mind paying more taxes. But I also am very careful as we get involved in these things, that we don't destroy the wealth by having bad policy. Bad policy can do that. I think Harvard business school graduates can spend a lot of time making sure we have very good policy. The world needs your help. And you did mention it was a defying moment.

I think it's a defined moment in terms of politics, the Middle East, America, and you, president of the United States. It is a defined moment. But a house divided doesn't stand. So I think we all need to do as much as we can. Many years ago I'll leave you with two last thoughts, one last thought, and I'll tell you what I want my tombstone to say. Many years ago, I read an article in the paper that was written by a Medal of Honor winner. A person won a medal of honor on Normandy Beach, June 6, 1944. And the person said something like the following.

I wish I could have gotten it for this, but I only remember it this morning. The person said, I will never forget that day or the people who died by my side. I am so proud of them, though I don't consider my medal earned by just me, he said. But now I'm 70 years old. I'm looking back at my life, and I realized the people who deserve a medal are the people. For 70 years, day in and day out, were good parents, good friends, helped the sick, help make it a better world through thick or thin, all the time, in little ways and in big ways. And that's how you are all going to add to this planet, too.

So my tombstone, actually, not my tombstone. I'm not sure I'm going to put my tombstone, but I hope people say we're going to miss the sobden and the world is a better place from having been here. So thank you. Congratulations. God bless you all. Godspeed and help make it a better world too. Thank you.

Leadership, Business, Harvard, Jamie Dimon, Career Management, Societal Obligations