JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is one of the world's most influential business leaders (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)Getty ImagesJamie Dimon, the influential and widely admired CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is known for straight talk on finance and the economy. He applies the same candor to career advice, telling business professionals what they haven’t learned in school but need to know.On The Master Investor Podcast, Dimon didn’t mince words when asked to give career advice to “ambitious and hungry” professionals who want to occupy senior management and leadership roles.One leadership skill made the top of Dimon’s list: disciplined communication.But when it comes to communication, Dimon said, too many leaders are “sloppy.”For Dimon, communication isn’t a soft skill. It’s a core leadership discipline that leads to faster and smarter decision-making. And that’s why ‘sloppy’ is such a perfect word to describe the state of communication today. A sloppy communicator is careless, someone who puts in very little thought or effort into organizing their ideas before they express them. Influential leaders do the opposite. They structure their thinking intentionally.MORE FOR YOUThat explains why Dimon pointed to one of the business world’s most disciplined communicators as an example: Jeff Bezos.Why Jeff Bezos Banned PowerPoint Dimon reminded executives and early-stage career professionals that Jeff Bezos created intentional communication mechanisms at Amazon. Most notably, said Dimon, “Bezos had people write six-page memos.”The written memos, or “six-pagers” as they became known within Amazon, were a powerful leadership practice I explored in The Bezos Blueprint. When Bezos required senior executives to replace PowerPoint presentations with carefully crafted “narratively written memos,” many people resisted the change. They quickly turned into believers and evangelists for the practice when they saw how well it worked.By replacing bullet points on a slide with written memos, individual leaders began to think and talk more clearly, sharpen their arguments before expressing them, and make better decisions more quickly. Many of Amazon’s former executives who had left to start or run other companies told me that the written memo was the most important management practice Bezos had taught them.Dimon’s next example revealed another hallmark of disciplined communication, one that any leader can apply in their very next conversation: the rule of three.The Structure That Makes Ideas StickDimon explained that sloppy communicators ramble and “pontificate.” Effective leaders do the opposite. They organize their thinking before they speak. How? By following the rule of three.Dimon suggested presenting information in the following framework:“We have three options—A, B, and C. Here’s how I weigh each option and why I’d pick B.”Dimon added, “That’s a discipline, by the way.”Dimon was demonstrating a well-known and timeless rule of persuasive communication. People process, remember, and act on information more easily when it’s organized into three buckets instead of an unstructured, rambling, and confusing stream of ideas. Dimon applies the rule himself in his shareholder letters, considered must-reads among global finance executives and in many business schools.In 2004, Dimon addressed the three internal drivers of corporate failure: bureaucracy, arrogance, and complacency. When he spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations this year, Dimon said long-term national security “rests on three legs: economic security, energy security, and military readiness.” And in The Master Investor Podcast, Dimon said he separates beneficial AI investments from the hype by asking three questions: Will it pay off? Will it pay off the way you expect? Will it pay off on the timetable you expect?’In short, based on his experience during the dot-com boom and bust, AI will benefit humanity over the long run, but don’t expect Wall Street to pick the winners or get the timing right.Dimon’s lesson is simple and direct: sloppy communication reflects sloppy thinking. Great leaders communicate with discipline, a habit that leads them to make better decisions, earn trust, and inspire confidence.