Remote Work Under Fire: All-In Podcast Unpacks Jamie Dimon’s Leaked Rant!

Jamie Diamond went on a rant about remote work and and zoom uh in a town hall and uh here's a snippet a lot of you were on the zoom and you were doing the following okay you know looking at your mail sending text to each other ask the other person is okay not paying attention not reading your stuff you know and if you don't think that slows down efficiency creativity creates rudeness and Stu it does okay and when I found out that people are doing that you do that my goddamn meetings you go to meeting with me you got my attention you got my focus I don't bring my goddamn phone I'm not sending text to people okay it simply doesn't work the Young Generation is being damaged by this that

may they may or may not be on your particular staff but they are being left behind they're being left behind socially ideas meeting people in fact my guess is most you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room that's not how you run a great company we didn't build this great company by doing that by doing the same semi disease that everybody else does Colson Brothers tell us about how you run stripe are you remote does this resonate with you four years after we've come out of the pandemic I love listening to Jamie Diamond rants like I feel like that's business ASMR um business ASMR that

itself to be a great podcast I was about to say I'm subscribing that's an instant $10 a month subscription what do you think John yeah I don't know people just said a lot of during the the pandemic like you remember it's like oh handshakes are going to be over business travel is going to be over every company is going to be fully remote I would say stripe broadly is in a pretty similar spot to where it was beforehand which is most people go into an office like most people are you know uh part of our San Francisco office or New York or Dublin or or Singapore wherever and then we have a bunch of people also who work

remotely I think kind of obviously you know Jimmy is right on some points I think also working remotely has had a bunch of benefits where there's a way larger talent pool available to companies like stripe and there's a lot of people you know you see uh kind of the two- body problem where it allows a lot of couples where you know maybe one partner is assigned to some Hospital in Idaho and like they don't get to choose what hospital necessarily they got assign to and the other person gets to work a a high-paying Tech job and so I don't know I think when like like one of the theories for declining dynamism in the US and declining tfp is there allocative

efficiency uh of of you know people deine as women enter the workforce because now you have you know what John describes this two body problem where you know both people have to make coordinated switches and uh rem remote works out actually yeah freeberg you're running a company now you're the CEO of ohalo tell us uh does this resonate with you what do you think especially about younger people his point and like being rude or being focused being in the meeting and then like maybe there's too many meetings where people are partially paying attention maybe there should be half as many meetings and people should be paying attention what do you think

well there's always room for optimization there we we deal with this too too many meetings too many people I think what was most striking for me about the Jamie Diamond rant and the resonance it seems to be having particularly in Silicon Valley and particularly with folks that are in leadership positions or on boards is that this is another example of what I think is kind of a different tenor for leaders in business right now relative to where we were a few years ago leaders are starting to step up and speak their mind and speak more directly and lead from the front rather than lead from the back I think the last couple of years

and I would say that the whole kind of transition a away from wokeism and coddled employee workforces which is something that a lot of folks talk about I'm I'm not trying to just characterize it I'm just saying that's the characterization that's been placed on it is that the employees made the decisions and then the leaders kind of said okay I'm subjugated to the employees whims and needs and look at what's gone on with Zuck he said you're with me you're me here's a buyout option Elon obviously was an Exemplar of this at Twitter uh We've now seen this become coinbase Brian and his letter and we've

now seen this become I think a bit more of a standard in the kind of emergence in the postco era that leaders can lead from the front speak directly and say this is the way things are going to be my job is not to coddle my employees my job is to lead my employees so that our organization our team wins and we achieve our mission that's the objective it's not to create a family workplace for everyone to be happy all the time it's to help the organization succeed and so I think I have heard from people individually I've seen this tenor shift underway right now um and I think that Jamie Diamond is another kind of Exemplar of this that that seems to have some resonance all right shth I want you

to respond specifically to this next clip let's play the second clip about organizational bloat every area should be looking to be 10% more efficient if I was ready to depart with 100 people I guarantee you if I wanted to I could run it with 90 and be more efficient I guarantee you I could do it just I could do it in my sleep and the notion these bureaucracies I need more people I can't get it done no because you're you're filling that request that don't need to be done your people going to meetings they don't need to go to someone told me to approve some his wealth management that they had to go to 14 committees I am dying to get the name of the 14 committees and I feel like firing 14

chairman of committees I can't stand it anymore all right shth the bloated bureaucracy at big companies your thoughts well you know there's that adage that says something akin to 50% of advertising is useless we just don't know which 50% yeah I think it's probably true for most corporate structures in general which is that a lot of the organizational bloat has evolved because of the way that people have responded to how you use technology so meaning if you went looked back 50 years years ago if you look at that famous picture of the Microsoft early team they didn't rely on software necessarily there wasn't Salesforce there wasn't work day there wasn't all

of this infrastructure and so instead they probably organized by what they were good at and they just tried to do things efficiently and I suspect that many companies in the absence of Technology found a way to just be very efficient that started to change when you had these rigid demarcations of where one job ended and another job started and part of why that happened is because you had all this software that went in and convinc people this will create efficiency but in return the chief marketing officer's job is XY and Z this is how the roles are defined this is how people do it and so I think that the reason why things have become so bureaucratic and Bloated is that there

is just this propensity to run towards software because you think it's a solution at best it's a symptomatic Aid it doesn't address the root cause and in fact it otes bureaucracy and it promotes the bloat that Jie's talking about and if you look at Jamie's p&l he spends $16 billion a year on it and I suspect that if you streamlined that you'd actually have half as many people because they'd be doing the job in a wholly different way and by the way the the counterfactual to it is if you look at companies like Facebook or Google or Tesla or SpaceX who designs and I'm sure stripe is the same who designs a lot of stuff internally that's custombuilt

for their or I think the way that you see this in the revenue per employee and a bunch of these other metrics in terms of the efficiency of those companies so I think what he is talking about is that he is a victim of this push to productivity because he would look like a lite if he didn't ad drop technology but by adopting the off-the-shelf stuff he introduces organizational blo because these things are demarked very very you got the marketing team as you mentioned using HubSpot and then you got like the sales team using I don't organ the other thing I just want to say on the first topic is I've mentioned

this before other than Engineers who are who are naive but can be extremely productive from day one there are very few other job types where naivity is an asset most people early in their career are in a jcurve where they are negatively contributing and the whole whole goal SL everybody down and the whole goal is that you invest in these people so that come out of the J curve there are probably other jobs that are like engineering but many many are not and so I think it's important to get the kind of Ming you get by being in an office and in the absence of that I think these young people like Jamie said are totally lost that's that's on them but then for the company they're

completely unproductive and useless which is on us hey John uh Toby I I don't know if you know Toby from Shopify but he did this like zerob based budgeting kind of concept for meetings he just purged all meetings at the beginning of the year he just like deleted everybody's meetings from the top down I'm curious how you think about bloat and just all of these meetings and committees do you worry about that at strip we know Toby very well and I don't know I always feel like yeah we should I'm tempted to uh take some of the ideas like we haven't done the meeting deletion one and you just say oh the meetings get recreated but they measured it and they didn't it sounds like uh and

I do always enjoy Toby's perspective which I think that you know many organiz ation problems are in fact software problems and you know you just need to write a script to literally like I think he wrote the script to all the meetings you know from the Google Calendar instance but uh there's kind of this Purity that uh you're you're over intellectualizing your problems and I do agree with jamat on the remote thing where like it's it's very dangerous one thing that can be dangerous with as CEOs think about this stuff is I think there is these unfair anecdotes that feel unfair that get people really riled up the quiet quitter is the anti-work

subreddit you know all these talk of people working two jobs and that generates a lot of energy with corporate leaders but you don't want to design your policies around like the bottom 5% of the company that would be a horrible mistake yeah you want to design your policies against the top town and we have some like outrageously productive remote people and they're off and again the cabin Idaho somewhere just you know Co coding up a storm the thing that we have seen and interestingly we measured this before Co because we were doing a lot of remote hiring and we wanted to see we want wanted to see how much we should lean into it is that it is not good for early career people we could

actually measure it in our productivity Data before the whole discussion about remote work happened during covid and it's bad from a work point of view it's also just bad from a personal point of view where they go mad because they're 23 years old and they're not solitary confinement it's literally solitary confinement it's ridiculous and by the way breaking news here Jamie Diamond now uh knows which 2,000 or I'm sorry 1,739 employees to lay off first there is a coworker.org petition to get Jaimie to retract his statement so the optin has been created if I know Jamie I know he'll be retracting that statement right away