Jamie Dimon explains why JPMorgan stopped letting managers decide who works from home: The question put to him was simple: why not let each manager decide? Dimon's answer: they tried that. "I believe in pushing power as far as down as you can. You know, regulators want all centralized. I push as far... to the branch manager, to the trader, to... with rules and, you know, constructs and stuff like that." But on remote work, the delegation failed: "We tried that with this, but the fact is they simply didn't exercise managerial skill. Everyone gave everyone everything, including people at my management table, by the way. And I eventually said, 'I've had it with that.'" He is clear that he isn't against remote work across the board. He points to a test the bank ran: "We have 10% of our people working home full time. We put virtual call centers in Baltimore and Detroit. We did it to see if they'd be effective. They're highly effective. They work from home. They're mostly minorities. That's why we did it. It's a home run. So I'm not against it where it works." His position on employees who object comes down to choice on both sides: "I also completely defend your right to say, 'I don't want to,' but I don't defend your right to tell me what J.P. Morgan's going to do. So you have a free market. You can do one thing, I can do another. That's what's called a free market." He also argues that the debate is narrower than it sounds: "You all may not know this, but 60% of Americans worked the whole time. Where did you get your Amazon packages from? Your beef, your meat, your vodka. Where did you get the diapers from?" He lists UPS and FedEx, manufacturing, agriculture, hospitals, schools, nurses, sanitation, firefighters and the military, then says: "It's only these people in the middle who complain a lot about it. I'm being quite serious." Then he gives three reasons it doesn't work in banking. 1. Young people fall behind, and the damage compounds. "The amount for the younger people being left behind. I've known this for a while. We can prove a little bit of it. And that is cumulative. It's not like the first month you're working. It's by the second year you have less people, you're put in less assignments, you know less what's going on, you have less conversations at the water cooler or in the cafeteria. So it's leaving them behind. I won't do that." He adds that bringing juniors in while their bosses stay home doesn't solve it: "And to have the younger people coming in, but not their bosses, I have a problem with that, too." 2. People think they are focused when they aren't. Dimon says he always hears "it works for me," and he describes what he saw on a call the day before: "As I was talking, there were 12 people in the room and four people on the screen, and all four people on the screen were on their phone." 3. Management happens in constant, informal back-and-forth. "When we meet in the morning, we talk, we have these debates all day long. We're talking, 'Hey, no, I checked on that. You're right about that. Here's what I think we should do.' All day long, constant update, constant share of information." And on culture, he is blunt: "It's impossible to do culture that way."