JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s Advice to Managers

If you work for Jamie Dimon, fair warning: The best way to impress him at a meeting might be to tell him what your team is doing wrong.

At a Morgan Stanley financial conference on Tuesday, the JPMorgan Chase CEO said he wants his teams to come to meetings and be radically honest about the problems they’re facing so they can workshop them — versus hoping they will go unnoticed.

The CEO said the antidote for “politics and B.S.” in meetings is to lay your cards out — or, as Dimon put it: Put your “dead cats on the table.”

He quoted a conversation he’d had at lunch, saying a participant told him: ‘We don’t have any dead cats. We have a few wounded ones.'” Dimon said he replied: “‘Go put the wounded ones on the table.'”

If meetings are “run for the boss,” that’s where problems arise, Dimon said.

He said one reason people focus on the wrong thing in meetings is that they’re fighting for resources — “for the credit of revenues and expenses and one set of books.”

“People don’t allocate properly, they’re not honest about their loss leaders, they give credit to parts of the company that don’t deserve credit,” he said.

Dimon said JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank by assets, strives to ask questions that go beyond the numbers. He offered the example of JPMorgan’s small business credit card products, saying they compete with American Express, but with one-third of the size. “If you were running that business, I’d be asking you, ‘What are they doing better?”

He added: “I’m fanatic about, ‘Are you doing your marketing?” Or “What’s the ROI? What’s the returns? Do you do what they do?”