Every April, Jamie Dimon’s annual shareholder letter generates attention for its sweeping take on the state of the world — the economy, geopolitics, financial risk, the Federal Reserve. The 2026 edition was particularly sobering, a 48-page document warning of stagflation risks from the Iran war, flagging vulnerabilities in the $1.8 trillion private credit market, and urging the United States to “get stronger.” But tucked inside the geopolitical alarm-raising was a section that caught the attention of a different kind of reader: the management thinkers, business school professors, and corporate leaders who have been wrestling with the same question for years.
How do you make a company with 300,000 people move like a startup?
For Dimon, the answer has a very specific shape. The real competitive battles, he wrote, are “fought on a more granular scale” — not between monolithic institutions but between teams. And those teams need to be small. Not just smaller-than-average small. Small in the way that Navy SEALs are small. Small in the way that the Army’s Delta Force is small. “The teams needed to tackle these challenges should be small and authorized with the decision-making ability to move and act like Navy SEALs or the Army’s Delta Force,” he wrote. “This is trench warfare; it’s about fighting for every inch, moving quickly and getting things done.”
Why This Is Different from the Usual Anti-Bureaucracy Talk
CEOs complaining about bureaucracy is one of the oldest genres in corporate communication. What makes Dimon’s version interesting is both the specific framing he uses and the moment at which he is making it.
On framing: the military analogy is not chosen casually. Navy SEAL teams operate in units of eight or fewer people. They are selected for specific missions, given clear authority to make decisions in the field, and held individually accountable for outcomes. The analogy implies something precise about corporate team design: it is not just about being small, it is about being small with full decision-making authority, a defined mission, and individual accountability. Dimon is not describing a task force that reports upward on every decision. He is describing a unit that acts.
The contrast he draws is equally specific. “Very often when a management team wants to accomplish something new, like create a digital account opening process that cuts across virtually every area, everyone on the team says, ‘We’ll get it done,’ meaning they will add it to the long list of tasks already on their plate.” This is the standard failure mode of large-organisation innovation: everyone is nominally responsible, so no one is actually responsible. When a task is only 1% of each person’s job, you do not get 100% commitment to that task. You get 1%.
This is the problem with accountability dilution, and it is not new. More than a century ago, French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann first documented what is now known as the Ringelmann effect: individuals pull harder on a rope when alone than when in a group, because each person implicitly expects others to compensate. A 1979 Ohio State study on “social loafing” formalised this further, finding that individual effort dropped sharply as the size of the cooperating group grew — because people assume their teammates aren’t trying as hard, set lower personal goals when help is available, and feel less individual accountability when their contribution is not evaluated separately.
Dimon knows this research, even if he does not cite it by name. His argument is essentially a management intervention against social loafing at scale.
The Twist That Bloomberg’s Framing Points To
Bloomberg’s characterisation of Dimon’s argument as a “new twist” is apt because Dimon is not simply restating the old case for small teams. He is connecting it to a broader observation about how large-company infrastructure can be used without generating large-company dysfunction — if it is organised correctly.
His framing of the platform question is particularly revealing: “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.”
This is a subtle but important point. The small-team argument, taken alone, can be read as an argument against scale. Dimon is explicitly not making that argument. JPMorgan’s technology infrastructure, regulatory infrastructure, brand, and distribution are precisely what gives its small teams an advantage over a genuine startup working on the same problem. A small team at a large bank can do things a three-person fintech cannot, because it is drawing on a platform built over decades. The risk is that the platform — and the layers of governance, compliance, and process that inevitably accumulate around it — starts to slow the team down rather than speed it up. The management challenge is to preserve the platform while eliminating the bureaucracy that accretes around it.
This is, incidentally, exactly the challenge that Amazon’s Andy Jassy has been attempting to solve through his restructuring campaign, which included a drive to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15%, the elimination of layers of management, and the creation of a “no bureaucracy” email alias where employees could flag unnecessary processes. Jassy’s language is strikingly similar to Dimon’s in emphasis: the goal is for the company to operate like the “world’s largest startup.” HSBC’s Georges Elhedery, who halved the number of HSBC’s operating businesses and significantly streamlined the group’s operating committee when he took over, has described the goal in similar terms — becoming “a simple, more agile, focused bank” that “moves with the speed our customers need.”
The AI Connection
The timing of Dimon’s argument is not coincidental. The small-teams thesis has taken on new relevance in the AI era for a specific reason: AI is compressing the labour requirements for discrete tasks dramatically, making it genuinely possible for small teams to accomplish what used to require large ones.
Dimon mentions AI explicitly among the areas where small, focused teams are needed. The pattern he is identifying has already been playing out in the startup ecosystem, where AI-powered companies have been able to achieve meaningful scale with headcounts that would have been unthinkable in previous decades. Block CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision to lay off 40% of his workforce — partly justified by the productivity gains available from AI — reflects the same logic at the other extreme.
For a bank with 300,000 employees, this creates a genuinely interesting management question. If AI is progressively handling tasks that used to require teams, and if small teams with full decision-making authority outperform large groups on the tasks that remain, the competitive future of large organisations may look less like a conventional hierarchy and more like a network of SEAL-sized units operating on shared platforms.
Dimon would probably prefer that analogy to the alternative, which is that large banks become slow-moving institutions that lose competitive battles to well-funded small teams willing to move faster.
The Broader Corporate Moment
Dimon’s argument lands in a moment when the anti-bureaucracy conversation in corporate America has reached unusual intensity. The combination of AI-driven productivity expectations, post-pandemic scrutiny of middle management layers, and the genuine competitive pressure from lean, fast-moving competitors has pushed CEOs across industries to articulate a version of the same case.
What Dimon adds to the conversation is the specificity of the military framing — the emphasis not just on smallness but on authority, accountability, and mission focus — and the acknowledgement that scale and agility are not mutually exclusive if the platform is properly separated from the bureaucracy. “The trick is to have great platforms without creating bureaucracy and to build great teams for speed.”
That may sound like a slogan. But coming from the CEO of the world’s largest bank by market cap, running an institution that just posted $16.5 billion in quarterly profit with investment banking fees up 28%, it is backed by something more substantial: evidence that the approach works.
Written by Shalin Soni, CMA specializing in financial analysis, global markets, and corporate strategy, with hands-on experience in financial planning and analytical decision-making.
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Source: Based on Bloomberg and publicly available information.
Disclaimer
This article is based on publicly available information, market developments, and credible media reports. The content is intended for informational and analytical purposes only and should not be considered financial, investment, or legal advice.