Annotations (18)
“I always look at what I call the fat tails. Around risk, there's always this ecosystem: everyone's doing it, everyone's okay, this is going to work, this time is different. And history teaches you a lot. In 1972, the stock market hit 1,000. It had hit 1,000 in 1968. By 1974, it was down 45%. In 1980, you had a recession. In 1982, another recession. It was lower than in 1968. In 1987, the market was down 25% in one day. In 1990, all these banks were taken to their knees by real estate losses.”— Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon Conversation
Economics & Markets · History & Geopolitics · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Crises recur; plan for worst ever
“When I look at risk, I always ask what I call the fat tails and manage that. We can handle all the fat tails, not just the stress test the Fed gives us. Market down 50%, interest rates up to 8%, credit spreads back to worst ever. Of course your results will be worse, but you're there. The thing about financial services: leverage kills you. Aggressive accounting can kill you. If you lose money as a financial company, people read that headline and lose trust. They run to take their money out.”— Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon Conversation
Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets · Operations & Execution
DUR_ENDURING
Manage to worst case, not base case
“If you work for me, I would tell you: I don't care what the incentive is. Don't do the wrong thing, and don't do the wrong thing to the client. If you're the client, how would you want to be treated? I had gotten rid of multiple risk things where they were being paid to take the risk. All of these investment banks were doing side deals, private deals, three-year deals, five-year deals. I got rid of almost all of them. Today at JPMorgan Chase, there are almost no side deals. We all know about it.”— Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon Conversation
Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Pay for outcomes, not activities
“The thing about margins is that we have that margin while investing a lot. It's much easier to have that margin if we could cut billions of dollars of marketing tomorrow. We can stop opening branches and save a billion dollars next year. Your margins will go up, your growth will go down, your long-term margins will probably get worse. So we look right through the cycle, and we look at the actual economics that we do, not the accounting of what we do.”— Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon Conversation
Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets · Operations & Execution
DUR_ENDURING
Optimize real economics, not accounting
“What we do is the same thing that a community bank does, other than investment banking. If you walk into a small community bank, they know your business account, they know your consumer account. They usually have a trust company. They manage your private affairs, set up a trust for you. And their CRM is up here. They don't need a Salesforce CRM because they know everyone in town. Those businesses fit together, they feed each other.”— Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon Conversation
Strategy & Decision Making · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_ENDURING
Keep only what feeds other parts
“Barry Diller on acquisitions at Paramount: We brought a different approach. In the television business, you develop material and you work on it for a long time. You do this ratio of development process where you may have 30, 40 projects and you pick just a few. The movie business didn't work that way at that time. It was basically packages assembled by agents who put stars together with a star director and brought them to the movie company. We turned that and just started developing material.”— Barry Diller
Barry Diller Conversation
Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Portfolio development beats packages
“Meredith Kopit Levien on subscription strategy: We are aiming to be the essential subscription for curious people everywhere who want to understand and engage with the world. Three ways we're going about that: One, we want to be the world's best news destination. Hard stop. Two, through building and buying, we have these market-leading lifestyle products that help people make the most of their lives and passions.”— Meredith Kopit Levien
Meredith Kopit Levien Conversation
Business & Entrepreneurship · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_CONTEXTUAL
Bundle creates usage frequency
“Barry Diller on independent entrepreneurship: I'd been a corporatist for 30 years. I was 49 years old. Could I be independent of a Mother Church? I got this thing in my head: you either are or you're not. It wasn't that I wanted to do it. I was fat and happy. But I thought, I can't accept that I was not capable of being independent. It literally forced me out the door.”— Barry Diller
Barry Diller Conversation
Psychology & Behavior · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_ENDURING
Identity test forces hard choices
“Barry Diller on QVC: It was this primitive convergence of televisions, telephones, and computers working together. It was the first time. On a green screen, the calls that came in when a product was put up would show it rising and falling. It was an epiphany. I'd only known screens to be used for telling stories, not for interactive commerce. I had no clue they could be interactive until I got to QVC. And that was primitive interactivity. This is 1993.”— Barry Diller
Barry Diller Conversation
Technology & Engineering · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_ENDURING
Early pattern recognition compounds
“Barry Diller on betting the company: I absolutely don't have those guts. I think the only thing you don't do is bet the company. You can take all sorts of risks, you can do all sorts of things that have risks. God knows, if you don't do those, nothing will happen. But to actually bet the company on a single thing, I think that is the thing to absolutely avoid, unless you're, in this case, Rupert Murdoch. Or unless you have no other options.”— Barry Diller
Barry Diller Conversation
Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Never bet company from strength
“Life is what you make it. It was hard for my family when we had to move to Chicago. I think the kids were 14, 12, 10. But I didn't like complaining about spilled milk. You just put on your pants, get going, and see what you can make out of it. I had opportunities to stay in New York to run bigger, more glamorous businesses. But this one, I was going to run the company. I put half my money in the stock. I was going to be captain of the ship.”— Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon Conversation
Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Total commitment signals permanence
“Barry Diller on William Morris mailroom: I basically read from A to Z. I read the entire file room, starting when I was 19 until I was 22. William Morris was the oldest and biggest talent agency, having been in business 70 years, so I had the entire history of the entertainment business that I got to read. How could you do better than that?”— Barry Diller
Barry Diller Conversation
Philosophy & Reasoning · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_ENDURING
Primary sources beat formal education
“My net worth, not my self-worth, was involved. I tell people this when they face setbacks. When I got fired from Citigroup at 42, after being President and COO, I went home to my family. I had the resources to never work again. But I went to work anyway, from 9 to 5, in an empty office, because work gives me purpose beyond financial security.”— Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon Conversation
Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management
DUR_ENDURING
Self-worth independent of net worth
“I don't know. I wish everyone the best. But I do believe, my grandparents, all Greek immigrants who didn't finish high school. There's a Greek ethic you learn from your parents: have a purpose. It could be art, science, military, business, being a great parent, a great teacher. But have a purpose and then do the best you can; give it your all. Don't be one of those people who's complaining all the time. You give it your best and then treat everyone properly, everyone.”— Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon Conversation
Philosophy & Reasoning · Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Purpose beyond financial security
“Meredith Kopit Levien on podcasts at The New York Times: When a reporter goes on The Daily and tells the story they've just published, they're doing two things. They're telling you about the story in a more casual way, almost like a friend guiding you through the news. But they're also exposing you to how that story came to be. That is fundamentally trust building. It's showing people the lengths we went to to present this topic in a fair and deeply reported way.”— Meredith Kopit Levien
Meredith Kopit Levien Conversation
Psychology & Behavior · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_ENDURING
Transparency about process builds trust
“Meredith Kopit Levien on AI and journalism: We firmly believe that journalism, particularly journalism about important things going on in the world, is first and foremost a human endeavor. It is by humans; it is for humans. You're not going to send a drone to the front line of a war versus a human being talking to people who've just been impacted. AI has the potential to be a force multiplier to everything we do. What does that look like? Making our journalism much more accessible to people.”— Meredith Kopit Levien
Meredith Kopit Levien Conversation
Technology & Engineering · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_CONTEXTUAL
AI as tool, not replacement
“Sports is a great analogy. If you have a sports team with a bunch of real jerks on it, are they going to be a great team? Almost never. If the team members aren't giving it their best every day during practice? Tom Brady: every day at practice, he worked hard. If people are not giving their best, you're not going to have a great team. The difference is, in business, you can BS about it all the time, you can make up stories, but in sports, you see it on the playing field. Do they play as a team?”— Jamie Dimon
Jamie Dimon Conversation
Leadership & Management · Culture & Society
DUR_ENDURING
Team character visible in sports, hidden in business
“Barry Diller on working for Rupert Murdoch: If you have to work for anybody, I would absolutely say work for him because he gave you all the authority and responsibility you wanted. He never made a single operating decision at Fox. We had one disagreement in eight years of working together. What he was able to create on three continents is remarkable. He loved betting the company.”— Barry Diller
Barry Diller Conversation
Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Delegate operations, keep strategy
Frameworks (3)
Fat Tail Stress Testing
Managing to Worst-Ever Outcomes
A risk management framework that stress tests institutions against historical worst-case scenarios across all risk categories simultaneously, rather than using base-case or moderate stress assumptions. Ensures survival through any plausible catastrophe.
Components
- Identify Historical Worst-Ever Outcomes
- Model Simultaneous Occurrence
- Ensure Survival Under All Combinations
- Accept Lower Returns in Good Times
Prerequisites
- Historical data on all major risk categories
- Executive commitment to lower short-term returns
- Board understanding of tail risk philosophy
Success Indicators
- Surviving multiple crisis events
- Maintaining higher capital and liquidity ratios than peers
- Ability to deploy capital in crises
Failure Modes
- Gradual erosion of standards under profit pressure
- Forgetting lessons during long bull markets
- Board revolt over 'underperformance'
Incentive Purification
Designing Compensation to Prevent Perverse Behavior
A compensation design framework that eliminates individual deal-level incentives and side agreements to prevent employees from taking excessive risks or acting against the firm's and clients' interests. Focuses on firm-wide outcomes and ethical behavior.
Components
- Eliminate Individual Deal-Level Compensation
- Tie Compensation to Firm-Wide Outcomes
- Test Plans for Perverse Incentives
Prerequisites
- Executive team alignment on philosophy
- Willingness to lose some talent who want individual upside
- Strong firm culture to replace individual incentives
Success Indicators
- Reduction in risk-taking scandals
- Improved client satisfaction scores
- Long-term employee tenure
Failure Modes
- Losing top performers to competitors
- Insufficient total comp to retain talent
- Slow cultural adoption
Creative Portfolio Development
From Mass Generation to Selective Greenlighting
A systematic approach to creative industries (film, TV, games, content) that generates a large volume of early-stage projects, narrows them through development stages, and only greenlights the final few with highest conviction. Beats both package-based and hero-project approaches.
Components
- Generate Volume at Idea Stage
- Narrow Through Development Stages
- Greenlight Only with High Conviction
Prerequisites
- Development budget discipline
- Clear stage-gate criteria
- Willingness to kill projects
Success Indicators
- Hit rate on greenlit projects
- Cost per greenlight declining
- Reputation attracting top talent
Failure Modes
- Development budgets spiraling
- Greenlighting weak projects under schedule pressure
- Losing talent to faster competitors
Mental Models (15)
Self-Worth vs. Net Worth
PsychologyThe psychological distinction between sense of identity and financial resources.
In Practice: Jamie Dimon explaining how he processed being fired from Citigroup
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Fat Tail Dominance
Probability & StatisticsIn distributions with fat tails, the rare extreme events dominate the total outcome.
In Practice: Dimon explaining JPMorgan's stress testing approach
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Survive First, Optimize Second
Decision MakingIn environments where ruin is possible, the primary decision criterion is survival, not optimization. Once survival is assured, then optimize. Applies to financial institutions (fortress balance sheet), startups (runway management), and military strategy. Violating this principle leads to spectacular failures.
In Practice: Dimon explaining why JPMorgan accepts lower returns in good times to ensure survival in bad times
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Mark to Reality Immediately
Decision MakingWhen you discover a problem, mark it down to its real value immediately rather than gradually or hopefully. Aggressive accounting that defers losses is a form of self-deception that compounds the problem. Taking the hit all at once allows clear thinking about the path forward.
In Practice: Dimon describing his first actions at Bank One when he discovered aggressive accounting
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Skin in the Game Signaling
Decision MakingPutting substantial personal capital at risk in a venture signals commitment and permanence more effectively than any words. Others observe your actions, not your statements. Dimon investing half his net worth in Bank One signaled he was 'going down with the ship or up with the ship' far more credibly than any speech could.
In Practice: Dimon explaining why he invested $60M in Bank One stock when he joined
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
This Time Is Different Fallacy
TimeThe recurring belief that 'this time is different' and historical patterns won't
In Practice: Dimon recounting the cyclical history of financial crises
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Incentive Design Principle
EconomicsPeople respond to incentives in predictable ways. If you pay someone based on a specific activity or outcome, they will optimize for that activity even if it's against the organization's or customer's interests. The solution is not to trust in ethics alone but to design incentive structures that align individual and organizational interests.
In Practice: Dimon explaining why JPMorgan eliminated individual deal-level compensation
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Through-Cycle Thinking
TimeOptimizing for outcomes over full economic cycles rather than quarterly or annua
In Practice: Dimon explaining why JPMorgan maintains high margins while still investing heavi
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Portfolio Synergy Principle
Systems ThinkingA portfolio of businesses where each part feeds the others creates more value th
In Practice: Dimon explaining JPMorgan's strategy of only keeping businesses that feed each o
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Trust Through Transparency
PsychologyShowing the process by which conclusions are reached builds more trust than just presenting conclusions.
In Practice: Meredith Kopit Levien explaining why The Daily's format builds trust
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Identity Constraints on Choice
Decision MakingYour sense of who you are (or who you're capable of being) constrains the choices available to you. Barry Diller couldn't accept that he was 'not capable of being independent,' which forced him to leave Fox and start over. Identity questions ('Am I the kind of person who...') are more powerful motivators than economic optimization.
In Practice: Barry Diller explaining why he left Fox to start his own company
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Primary Source Immersion
Decision MakingImmersing yourself in primary sources (original documents, files, data) allows pattern recognition that no secondary analysis can provide. Reading Elvis Presley's entire career file gives you insights that no textbook on the music industry could teach. Applies to any domain where historical patterns matter.
In Practice: Barry Diller describing his education in the William Morris file room
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Asymmetric Risk from Strength
Probability & StatisticsTaking existential risks from a position of strength is foolish because you have everything to lose.
In Practice: Barry Diller explaining why he wouldn't bet the company like Rupert Murdoch
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Portfolio Development Strategy
Strategic ThinkingIn hit-driven businesses (movies, drugs, startups), you cannot predict winners at the idea stage. Th
In Practice: Barry Diller explaining how he turned around Paramount by implementing TV-style development
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Bundle Frequency Lock-In
Systems ThinkingA bundle of products where each component appeals to different usage frequencies
In Practice: Meredith Kopit Levien explaining The New York Times subscription bundle strategy
Demonstrated by Leg-jdr-001
Connective Tissue (2)
Financial crisis cycles resembling epidemic patterns
Jamie Dimon's recitation of cyclical financial crises (1972-74 crash, 1982 recession, 1987 Black Monday, 1990 real estate crisis, 1997 Asian crisis, 2000 dot-com, 2008 GFC) maps to the epidemiological pattern of recurring pandemics. Each crisis follows the same behavioral pattern: leverage builds during calm periods, everyone believes 'this time is different,' risk accumulates invisibly, then a trigger event causes sudden collapse. The intervals between crises (typically 7-15 years) match the time needed for institutional memory to fade and risk-taking to rebuild. Just as populations become vulnerable to new disease strains after immunity wanes, financial markets become vulnerable to new crisis patterns after the previous generation of risk managers retires or forgets.
Dimon explaining his historical perspective on why fat-tail stress testing is necessary
Sports team dynamics as business culture mirror
Jamie Dimon's sports analogy captures a fundamental truth about organizational performance that's visible in sports but hidden in business. In sports, you immediately see whether a team has chemistry, whether players give maximum effort in practice, whether they play as a unit. Tom Brady working hard every day in practice was visible; the resulting Super Bowl wins were the output. In business, these same dynamics exist but are obscured by accounting, narratives, and time lags. A team of talented jerks will fail in both domains, but in business you might not discover this for years, whereas in sports you see it by halftime. The sports mirror lets you see organizational truth immediately rather than waiting for quarterly results.
Dimon explaining why JPMorgan's culture gives them an edge
Key Figures (6)
Barry Diller
6 mentionsChairman of IAC, Former CEO of Paramount, Fox, QVC
Meredith Kopit Levien
3 mentionsCEO of The New York Times Company
Rupert Murdoch
2 mentionsFounder and Chairman of News Corp
Linda Bamman
1 mentionsCredit Executive at Bank One
Hired by Dimon at Bank One to lead credit risk management.
- Negotiated for full authority before accepting credit role
Tom Brady
1 mentionsNFL Quarterback
Diane von Furstenberg
1 mentionsFashion Designer, Barry Diller's Wife
Glossary (1)
hegemony
VOCABULARYDominance or leadership, especially by one state or social group over others
“The whole hegemony has now shifted to tech. Tech now totally controls media.”
Key People (2)
Tom Brady
(1977–)NFL quarterback, 7-time Super Bowl champion
Rupert Murdoch
(1931–)Australian-American media mogul who built News Corp and Fox empire
Concepts (2)
fat tail risk
CL_ECONOMICSDistributions where extreme events are more likely than normal distribution predicts; risk of rare but catastrophic events
large language model (LLM)
CL_TECHNICALAI systems trained on vast text corpora to generate human-like text; trained by learning patterns from existing written content
Synthesis
Synthesis
Migrated from Scholia