Grit(79)

Jamie has been the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, for more than a decade. In the 2008 financial crisis, Jamie steered his bank to safety, and while other banks collapsed entirely, JPMorgan Chase somehow turned a $5 billion profit.

Coincidentally, the motto of Jamie’s prep school alma mater, the Browning School, is “grytte,” an Old English version of grit defined in an 1897 yearbook as “firmness, courage, determination . . . which alone win the crown of genuine success in all undertakings.” In Jamie’s senior year at Browning, his calculus teacher had a heart attack, and the substitute teacher didn’t know calculus. Half the boys quit; the other half, including Jamie, decided to stick with it and spent the entire year in a separate classroom, alone, teaching themselves.

“You have to learn to get over bumps in the road and mistakes and setbacks,” he told me when I called to talk about the culture he’s built at JPMorgan Chase. “Failures are going to happen, and how you deal with them may be the most important thing in whether you succeed. You need fierce resolve. You need to take responsibility. You call it grit. I call it fortitude.”

Fortitude is to Jamie Dimon what sisu is to Finland. Jamie recalls that getting fired from Citibank at age thirty-three, and then taking a full year to ponder what lessons to take from the episode, made him a better leader. And he believes in fortitude enough to make it a core value for the entire JPMorgan Chase bank. “The ultimate thing is that we need to grow over time.”

Is it really possible, I asked, for a leader to influence the culture of such an enormous corporation? True, the culture of JPMorgan Chase has, with some affection, been described as “the cult of Jamie.” But there are literally thousands and thousands of JPMorgan Chase employees Jamie has never met in person.

“Absolutely,” Jamie says. “It takes relentless—absolutely relentless—communication. It’s what you say and how you say it.”

It may also be how often you say it. By all accounts, Jamie is a tireless evangelist, crossing the country to appear at what he calls town hall meetings with his employees. At one meeting he was asked, “What do you look for in your leadership team?” His answer? “Capability, character, and how they treat people.” Later, he told me that he asks himself two questions about senior management. First: “Would I let them run the business without me?” Second: “Would I let my kids work for them?”

Jamie has a favorite Teddy Roosevelt quote he likes to repeat:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

And here is how Jamie translates the poetry of Roosevelt into the prose of a JPMorgan Chase manual, titled How We Do Business: “Have a fierce resolve in everything you do.” “Demonstrate determination, resiliency, and tenacity.” “Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.” And, finally, “Use mistakes and problems as opportunities to get better—not reasons to quit.”



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Anson Dorrance has the challenge of instilling grit in considerably fewer people. Thirty-one women, to be exact, which is the full roster of the women’s soccer team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Anson is the winningest coach in women’s soccer history. His record includes twenty-two national championships in thirty-one years of competition. In 1991, he coached the U.S. Women’s National Team to its first world title.

During his younger, playing days, Anson was the captain of the UNC men’s soccer team. He wasn’t especially talented, but his full-throttle, aggressive playing in every minute of practice and competition earned the admiration of his teammates, who nicknamed him Hack and Hustle. His father once declared, “Anson, you’re the most confident person without any talent I’ve ever met.” To which Anson quickly replied, “Dad, I’m taking that as a compliment.” Many years later, as a coach, Anson observed that “talent is common; what you invest to develop that talent is the critical final measure of greatness.”

Many of Anson’s admirers attribute his unprecedented success to recruitment. “That’s simply incorrect,” he told me. “We’re out-recruited by five or six schools on a regular basis. Our extraordinary success is about what we do once the players get here. It’s our culture.”

Culture building, Anson said, is a matter of continuous experimentation. “Basically, we’ll try anything, and if it works, we’ll keep doing it.”

For instance, after learning about my research on grit, Anson asked each of his players to fill out the Grit Scale and made sure each received their score. “To be honest, I was absolutely shocked. With only one or two exceptions, the grit ranking on your test is the way I would have evaluated their grit.” Anson now makes sure the entire team scores themselves on grit each spring so that they have “a deeper appreciation for the critical qualities of successful people.” Each player gets to see her score because, as Anson put it, “in some cases the scale captures them, and in some cases it exposes them.” Returning players take the scale again—and again—each year so they can compare their grit now to what it used to be.