Jamie Dimon said that business leaders should anticipate that the economy will have problems.
At an event in DC, the JPMorgan CEO said companies shouldn’t continuously change their plans.
Dimon said operating in a “stop-start” way risks harming confidence in existing projects.
Don’t expect much sympathy from Jamie Dimon if you’re complaining about the economy.
When asked about the country’s economic headwinds, the JPMorgan Chase CEO kept it short and not particularly sweet: “That’s life.”
Speaking in DC at the Business Roundtable’s CEO Workforce Forum on June 17, Dimon said companies shouldn’t be surprised by economic turbulence. He added that it’s unwise to make plans based on short-term predictions of what will happen in the next 12 or 18 months.
“I don’t buy this notion that somehow we have the right to expect everything to be constantly easy and easy to get by,” he said. “There will be economic problems.”
Those seemingly inevitable problems, though, shouldn’t drastically change how a company functions or the programs it funds. Dimon said that JPMorgan will sometimes trim initiatives, but doesn’t cut them if they’re working well.
“We don’t do almost anything stop-start, whether it’s training people, hiring people, opening brands, hiring bankers, doing technology,” he told the crowd. “We have a plan, and we’re going to do the plan, and then we navigate through the ups and downs of the economy.”
Companies that operate more reactively risk harming confidence in their existing projects, such as training programs for young people.
“Don’t change your plans at all,” Dimon said.
Americans are generally spooked about making big economic decisions amid today’s unpredictability. And among the C-suite, the word “uncertainty” was popular on recent earnings calls.
Representatives for JPMorgan did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
Correction: June 17 — An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the conference. It is the Business Roundtable’s CEO Workforce Forum.
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