Jamie Dimon on Diversity & energizing office culture - finally someone explains it
pls. 1st comment responder clearly didn't read the post (pls fix this :) ) nor watched Jamie's words because they quickly turned this into a race thing when my post is not about race so pls. read my post and watch the 5mins of video starting from location given below.
if this is the level of quick reading skills among our angry buddies on here, that explains a lot!
I have lurked here for a while - helped me a lot when I was recruiting back in the day but have always been disturbed by the attitudes towards "diverse candidates" on this forum. As someone who touches recruitment, the dissonance between the world of URM communities and this forum is also very jarring. I recently came across an interview with the man himself, Jamie Dimon which really reassured me that there are leaders in our industry who bring light to this issues around diversity.
From the 31:50 mark and 50:20 mark
At the end of the day, diversity should be a really simple proposition - treat people as you would want to be treated. Create blind and fair processes for getting talent - if clients come to expect that the very best are advising them, they will not care about such person's temperament, religious beliefs, gender, race, ethnicity, pedigree, etc. I always say that none of us care about the temperament of our pilot or the gender of our surgeon when we are in the emergency room or how cool or connected our dentist is, but all these suddenly matter in clubby corporate environments where "culture" is used to select rich kids, cool kids, smooth-talkers, sprinkles of "diverse" candidates.
Jamie Dimon may not be what he preaches( I don't know the man) but he really gets it - Having worked in corporate, it is so weird to me how majority groups get so comfortable with themselves and won't even acknowledge other folks.
As a mentor at work, I have coached a (white male) intern who was not into the drinking culture among analysts and therefore was so isolated because folks decided he was weird and stopped adding him to anything (no he was not "weird"), a black intern who told me that his (insert non-black) seatmate wouldn't even talk to him, that when he invited folks to coffee outside of official coffee chats, they didn't reciprocate (no one is that boring if they are initiating coffee chats). I imagine this is exponentially worse for black women. Weirdly enough some of the URM in banking (white women and Asians) with higher representation in corporate show similar patterns in how they interact with those less represented - pay attention to his in your teams.
Again, Jamie correctly diagnosed this in this interview which is a must-watch for people who are working to foster positive environments in banking.
Not sure where humans went wrong, but if we all did what Jamie says (make everyone feel like they are part of the team in ways small and large, simply include that "weird kid" or "black girl" or "gay guy" or "white chick" the same way you would want to be included if you found yourself on an island where you were the minority, over time there'd really be no need for the complexity we now have around diversity - whether it is gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, age, personality.
Love and peace!
This is the pleasant public face of "diversity and inclusion". It's about treating people right! These people are often excluded, here's a handful of anecdotes! We need to foster "positive environments"! But literally anyone who has been on the other side of recruiting knows that's total horse shit and not at all the way "diversity" initiatives work in banking or any other selective profession. Reality is more like:
Jamie says this stupid shit because he's a public-facing representative of JP Morgan and this dumb as fuck woke religion is now the dominant cultural zeitgeist. He says it because he has to say it.
You don't work in banking. Fuck off. This D&I shit is pure grift, and anyone who has spent time on the other side knows it.
Impressive insights about banking recruitment from an associate 1! You even have insights into MD level promotions!
You lost me at how easy it is at the MD level given how overflowing minorities and women are in IB - really?
And really took the conversation in an very different direction! whew! and never addressed anything beyond minorities and women - I wonder why? All the white guys in high finance totally deserved it, ainit?
also, what about what jamie said do you disagree with?
Literally none of this was responsive to anything I said. Also i'm an Associate 2 (name needs updating), i.e. i've been involved in recruiting from the employed side for three cycles and saw it from the recruit side for two cycles. Five. Same story the entire time. And yeah, anyone who works in banking pays attention to Director and MD promotes. You would know this if you worked in banking. But you don't. There are few seniors in banking who are women or URMs because the pool of people who are both 1) Qualified enough and 2) Interested in the career is trivially small. Anyone checking either box who is both competent enough and wants to stick around can stick around. The same isn't true for white or asian males - promotions become highly selective.
And what do you mean I never addressed "anything beyond minorities and women"? Isn't that the point of the topic you made? Diversity candidates? Why wouldn't I address the point of the topic you made? And no, all of the white guys in high finance absolutely don't deserve it - when I pointed out people with "family connections" as having an unfair advantage, most of those people are white. Odd that you forgot Asians, but hey. We both know why - they don't fit the narrative. They're not white, and yet they're incredibly successful. Best just to ignore them.
On Jamie Dimon - any points in particular that you're asking about? It was mostly him bragging about the quotas they've filled. Invite women to golf events. Ok, cool, sure.
As a minority, from my personal experience, the first part of that sentence is not true. Won't comment on the rest, I don't like the way diversity recruiting is done but frankly like to stay away from the culture wars.
It's not a universal hostility, but man it's not that black and white. I can share my experiences and believe me, it's echoed by a lot of others. I've had peeps in the bullpen consistently not acknowledge my presence, I have had bankers I worked for do the same. It's fucked watching peers snake credit because apparently "those people don't like conflict".
There are tons of small things. I have been questioned on "cultural" fit, whatever the fuck that means. I have been told I lack "insert country name" experience despite having BB experience in two of the global hubs. Me and other minorities have been excluded from bullpen events where the demographic is "monolithic". I could go on and on. I will note this is not a white people thing.
Again, this is not universal. Majority of the people I've worked with are amazing, smart and treat me like everyone else. But there is a minority, and that is not ok. I now work somewhere where they only color they care about is money and I don't face any of that anymore.
Couple of responses.
1. Do you have an international background? I initially had a caveat saying that people from international backgrounds are an exception and are treated differently. Not fair, but also not surprising - if Americans relocated to Japan and took a job there they would feel similar pressures.
2. I'm not saying this necessarily applies to you (I don't know the exact details of your experiences), but there has been a general trend of people attributing any sleight that everyone experiences (senior bankers ignoring you, people stealing credit, people doubting your ability to accomplish a task, on and on) to racial or gender animus. People's perceptions that they are being discriminated against have risen in lockstep with the shift in liberal ideology towards wokeism and people telling them 24/7 that everyone is racist or sexist and trying to screw them over.
And for the millionth time, we have another anti-diversity bro "speaking his truth." You mention URMs having "insane advantages at every point of the process..." That process you speak of is, what, a few weeks to a month of interviews? What about all the shit and second class treatment they had to put up with from their birth to the start of the interview process? And what do you mean when you say they've faced zero real hardship? Just because some black kid comes from an upper middle class family doesn't mean they magically get to escape all the crap black people are faced with. Sure, they avoid a majority of trouble from say a George Floyd type who came from poverty and unfortunately wasn't well educated, but they still get profiled on occasion and can't control everyone's biases towards them.
Your attitude is exactly what OP was getting at when they mentioned that majority groups get so comfortable with themselves that they totally disregard others simply as humans. Of course URMs are going to have weaker stats when the Majority group creates the tests and runs the schools. I hope you were just drunk or having a bad day and needing to vent, because I'm not sure how diversity programs are directly shafting you so badly that you felt the need to post this diatribe against URMs on a random forum.
You're extremely delusional if you think URMs are suddenly sitting on cloud nine in society thanks to some bank's diversity program.
You raise a good point. George Floyd turned out to be a very good analyst and after HBS broke into a mega fund. Did he have the same stats as you or me? No, but he overcame his adversity.
"Top undergrad in Canada", lmao, that doesn't exist. Fuck off with your delusions.
Here we go again, with diversity, I know kids who expolited diversity program even through they are well connected and rich, diversity programs needs a reform where they solely focus on recruiting kids who come from a poor, i.e check how much their family makes, are they near poverty level etc. instead of doing this ethicity bullshit you can be privileged and be black, women Hispanic, whereas if you target socioeconomics you are targeting every ethnicity
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another one who got into IB but cannot read (has low attention to detail) but sure it's other kids who didn't deserve to get in! once again, address the topic - u may learn sthg!
Thanks bud. It’s a public forum I can post/respond to literally anything I want.
We should all take moral guidance from unscrupulous corporate executives. If Jamie Dimon says that we need more representation of jabbed non-conforming LGBT+ fat indigenous bodies of color then clearly he is correct. He clearly is just looking out for us, and as a billionaire bank executive, I can trust he's not out of touch. It's executives like him that make me trust the experts in the sacred halls of our democracy!
Never mind all of this shit...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPMorgan_Chase#Controversies