His Role Secure, Jamie Dimon Offers Leadership Tips on LinkedIn

  • The famously outspoken CEO of JPMorgan Chase has kept relatively quiet during the last few months of shareholder pressure and regulatory scrutiny. On Tuesday, he tried to make up for lost time.

    June 11
  • The famously outspoken CEO of JPMorgan Chase has kept relatively quiet during the last few months of shareholder pressure and regulatory scrutiny. On Tuesday, he tried to make up for lost time.

    June 11

Jamie Dimon has spent months fending off critics of his leadership skills. Now he's dispensing advice about those skills.

Good managers step up when times get tough, show discipline, have high standards and face facts, the JPMorgan Chase (JPM) chairman and CEO wrote in a blog post published Thursday on LinkedIn (LNKD).

Dimon, who in May prevailed over a shareholder initiative that sought to strip him of his chairmanship, wrote that a leader must also have the qualities of openness, fortitude and humility.

"While we cannot be great at all of these traits — I know I'm not — to be successful, a leader needs to get most of them right," Dimon wrote.

He is the first bank CEO to join LinkedIn's "Influencers" series, which launched last year and features advice from hundreds of prominent executives and other leaders. Their potential readership includes the professional-networking website's roughly 200 million members. 

Thursday's post is Dimon's second in the series, after a May entry on the economy that was largely taken from his annual letter to shareholders. His new blog post comes as he returns to outspoken form, after what was for him a subdued spring. On Tuesday, he defended his company's handling of a multibillion-dollar trading loss last year, telling investors at a Morgan Stanley (MS) conference "there was no lying, there was no bull----ing, period."

LinkedIn sounds pretty happy with the contributions from Dimon, who runs the nation's biggest bank. "We're delighted," John Abell, a senior editor at LinkedIn, told Bloomberg recently. "I hope he is, too."

In future posts Dimon is expected to riff on such topics as the economy, America's place in the world and other "upbeat kinds of things from a perspective, a perch that's unparalleled," Abell said.

A JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Dimon's participation in the series, but commenters on LinkedIn had a range of reactions to his latest post. "Good checklist that serves as a scorecard for yourself and your organization," wrote Marco H. "I appreciated the mention of moral[e]-building and humility," added Chuck B.

Others were more skeptical about Dimon's qualifications for dispensing advice. "As one of the architects of the financial meltdown, the immense hubris required to speak of 'leadership' and to include 'high standards…' puts this post on my ten most cognitively dissonant," Stephen W. said.

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