Business Insight Zone

Maybe even as smart as ol’ Pierpont himself?

I’ve had a couple of friends ask me who could come out on top of the current Wall Street mess. My guess — and it’s hardly original, since it’s backed by a recent Fortune magazine cover story — is Jamie Dimon and his crew at JPMorgan Chase.

The cover story in question is well worth reading both to find out how Dimon helped his bank sidestep the subprime disaster, and to discover more about how Dimon operates — full of ego and id, yet seemingly free of many of the blind spots that bedevil top CEOs. Here it is:

Jamie Dimon’s swat team
How J.P. Morgan’s CEO and his crew are helping the big bank beat the credit crunch.

This bit, I thought, was particularly telling:

Dimon relies on a trusted team of talented lieutenants who share his zeal for sifting piles of data to spot trouble before it happens and vigilantly control risk, even when that means sacrificing growth and losing market share to rivals.

The echoes of Warren Buffett deafen me. Buffett does not take on an investment without taking a hard, anti-wishful-thinking look at the downside risk — that is, the chance that he could lose lots of money.

Seems simple, yeah? You look for strong upsides where you can find them, but look even harder for the traps that might undo all your progress. If you can make a good-to-excellent return on most of your investments, without ever losing very much on any investment, you stand to make beaucoup money.

Yet as the Fortune article makes clear, losing less is enough, in this sorry market, to buff Dimon’s two-decades-running image as a brilliant banker.

Read it all.

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Related posts:

• “Unforeseeable” circumstances.
• 1907 redux?

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(Image via Wikipedia.)

Category: Executives, Finance & Real Estate