Jamie Dimon: Company Teams Should Operate Like Navy SEALs

In a letter to company shareholders on 6 April, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon vocalised his beliefs that opting for a smaller team is more beneficial for company decision-making, citing increased flexibility and fewer levels of bureaucracy.

“The teams needed to tackle [specific problems] should be small and authorised with the decision-making ability to move and act like Navy SEALs or the Army’s Delta Force,” Jamie said. 

“This is trench warfare; it’s about fighting for every inch, moving quickly and getting things done.”

While JPMorgan Chase employs some 320,000 people, Jamie said that the “real competitive battles” are won by smaller teams with a refined focus.

He added that competitions in the industry are won in very specific areas, whether a segment of investment banking, a type of client or a product feature.

Smaller teams, with a more concise list of tasks, are incentivised to give their full focus to any given piece of work, he argued, saying: “When efforts are 1% of a lot of people’s jobs, it will never get done. You need a team 100% dedicated to the mission – and everyone else supports them.”

Advocating for smaller teams

Jamie isn’t alone in his advocacy for smaller teams. Major companies like Meta have focused their structure around smaller teams, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg said might be the “optimal configuration for driving frontier research” on an earnings call last year.

However, unlike Jamie and his belief that smaller teams work best when laser-focused on specific areas, Mark is expecting small teams to do the work of entire departments as the company adopts an increasingly AI-driven approach.

Already this year, Meta has laid off hundreds of workers and implemented a worker-to-manager ratio of 50-to-1 within its AI engineering organisation – an organisational structure well above the current average ratio of 11.5-to-1, according to Gallup.

While eliminating layers of management could increase decision-making and innovation opportunities, Jamie argues that accountability for tasks could get diluted.

Despite these risks, US companies are continuing to implement flat structures and are increasing the number of people reporting to each supervisor, with the average team size now nearly 50% larger than when Gallup began tracking sizes in 2013.

According to André Spicer, Executive Dean of Bayes Business School, flat structures don’t often last long, as employees gravitate toward more managerial interaction.

“What happens in most organisations is eventually either a formal or an informal structure appears sort of underneath direct reports,” he said.

Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos famously came up with the “two-pizza” rule for establishing the ideal team size – every team should be small enough to be fed with just two pizzas, which according to AWS Insights roughly equates to less than 10 people.

AI to reduce bureaucracy

While singing praises for small units, Jamie has said companies need enterprise-wide AI, data and financial platforms and that these systems shouldn’t be used to create bureaucratic hurdles but instead focus on being “highly efficient.”

He added that people need to be connected across the enterprise and “perform like a well-functioning sports team.”

As Jamie looks to further integrate AI into JPMorgan Chase’s operations, he said in the letter that while AI will likely eliminate some jobs, it will, in turn, create others and that the company plans to “support and redeploy” the affected workforce.

“[AI] platforms need to be companywide and easily deployed,” he said.

“Before they are deployed, it may require consensus that they are the best platform to use. This makes them reusable and highly efficient. The trick is to have great platforms without creating bureaucracy and to build great teams for speed.”