Jamie Dimon, one of the banking industry’s longest-serving CEOs, has thoughts on why some CEOs rise to the occasion while others flounder—and it has little to do with how much they know about business.
Dimon, who has served as CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank by market cap, for 20 years, said on the Master Investor Podcast in an interview published on Monday that, more than anything, insecurity is one of the biggest threats to a CEO’s career and their company’s success.
As Dimon puts it, when executives climb the corporate ladder, they often go from being an expert overseeing one area of the business they know well to a generalist responsible for other areas of the company of which they’re unfamiliar.
“The bigger job you get, the less you know—literally—about the job,” he told the podcast’s host Wildfred Frost.
Some CEOs handle that transition well, he said. They seek out people with expertise they lack and don’t get embarrassed when they don’t know something.
