1. 1
Duff McDonald (2010). Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan
Chase (New York & London: Simon Schuster), pp. 340, U.S. $28.00
INTRODUCTION
JP Morgan Chase has not only emerged unscathed from the financial crisis of 2008,
but continues to provide leadership on Wall Street. What are we to make of this
remarkable feat? What was its business model? What was the role of Jamie Dimon in
making this possible? What, more specifically, are the challenges of leadership in the
financial sector in the United States? These then are the four important questions
that Duff McDonald addresses in this riveting biography of Jamie Dimon. This is not
strictly speaking an academic study that will only appeal to specialists in banking
and finance or those who have a professional interest in financial history. It is
instead an attempt to make the learnings from the recent financial crisis available to
as wide an audience as possible. It is in fact a good way for MBA students to get a
feel for what it is like to work for a high-powered Wall Street firm before taking the
plunge.
This book will also appeal to those who are interested in leadership studies,
especially because there are not too many case studies on leadership that have been
written in the area of finance despite its systemic importance to the economy. This lacuna
probably has to do with an undifferentiated approach to Wall Street in leadership
studies, where the focus has been on Wall Street as a whole or on the profile of
individual firms in terms of their financial performance rather than on how specific
leaders think and lead in the financial sector. Finance is also perceived to be an area

2. 2
that involves a greater focus on numbers rather than people; it has therefore been
neglected from the point of view of leadership studies. In most studies of leadership,
the CEO is usually depicted as the chief decision maker who has to make important
trade-offs (given the constraints that he must work under) between the strategic
function and the HR function. The structural conflicts that arise at such moments
then are usually seized upon to provide an element of drama or human interest in
these accounts. The question of whether the CEO leans towards the strategic
function or the HR function then is seen as an important clue to his cognitive and
leadership style.
Jamie Dimon
McDonald’s has a slightly different approach in this biography of Jamie Dimon; in
addition to the usual trade-offs that leaders must be good at, he argues that it is
important to situate the relationship between the organizational culture of JP
Morgan Chase and the leadership style that brought it to the forefront during the
recent crisis. The fact that McDonald is interested in the idea that Dimon is actually
leading the firm rather than just going along with whatever is happening on Wall
Street is indicated in the main title of this book. But the fact that he is leading a
specific firm with its own set of intrinsic requirements is revealed in the sub-title. It
is therefore important to approach the relationship between Jamie Dimon and JP
Morgan Chase in as context specific a manner as possible without being in a hurry to
extrapolate the achievements described in this book into a general theory of
leadership. This book then is like a lengthy HBS case study of Jamie Dimon’s
approach to leadership in the financial sector.

3. 3
While developing a general theory of leadership in the context of how Wall Street
firms function might be the eventual goal for business academics, this book does not
have the empirical scope in itself to make that possible; it nonetheless serves as an
important effort in that direction. In order to make this contextualized notion of
leadership possible, however, McDonald not only provides the basic trajectories of
Jamie Dimon’s education and career that led up to his ascent at JP Morgan Chase,
but also helps us to understand where the firm is coming from and how it is situated
within the political economy of Wall Street. McDonald also analyzes Dimon’s
previous assignments at American Express, Citigroup, and Bank One, and how they
prepared him for the responsibilities that he currently handles at JP Morgan Chase.
Jamie Dimon Testifies
While Dimon is from a family of bankers and
banking comes naturally to him - that alone
is not enough to explain his levels of interest
or success in this area. An important clue to
Jamie Dimon’s mind is provided by Dean Jay
Light of the Harvard Business School who
points out that the year 1980, when Dimon
entered HBS, was a not a favorable period for management graduates seeking
careers in banking or finance.
The financial sector had not recovered fully from the stagflation of the 1970s. It was
therefore not an opportune moment, given the risk factors, to gravitate to investment
banking. Light points out that only those ‘who were truly interested in finance’ were
willing to even contemplate a career in these areas - let alone make it big repeatedly
in the way that Jamie Dimon did in a number of important financial firms.

4. 4
Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein
So, interestingly, Wall Street in the early 1980s was for once immune to the
aspirations that are mediated by the herd instinct amongst MBAs (which is often the
case in high-paying areas like finance). McDonald also points out that Light noticed
that ‘Dimon has a powerful independent streak, and often a different grasp of what
a manager’s priorities should be in case studies,’ along with a continual passion for
‘self-improvement.’ McDonald also provides a brief profile of Dimon’s performance
at HBS with a list of his likes and dislikes, along with brief anecdotes of his
intellectual ‘skirmishes’ while discussing cases in the classroom until his eventual
graduation as a Baker scholar.
What the HBS experience represents then is a symbolic forerunner of the leadership
style that Jamie Dimon was to make his own in investment banking. This is a book
that will be of immense interest to those who are either interested in a career in high
finance or who are just plain curious as to who these titans are who have taken up so
much of our attention span in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.
It will also be of interest to those interested in banking and financial regulation since
J. P. Morgan is an important case study of a firm that did not do badly unlike any
number of firms that collapsed during the financial crisis, but was instead in a
position to bail out Bear Sterns and others who needed the help.

5. 5
Jamie Dimon is not only the ‘last man standing’ in Wall Street, but one of the few
who is willing to think furiously about what must be done to prevent the next
financial crisis. That is why his views are highly sought after by Congressmen and
Senators when he appears before their committees. It is time then for business
academics and for members of the broader economy to pick his brains as well.
Reading this lucid account of how Jamie Dimon made it in Wall Street might be a
way of starting to do precisely that. Jamie Dimon is not only the last man standing,
but also the ‘last man thinking.’ What Jamie Dimon can teach us then is to think on our
feet.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN