Dear Jamie Dimon: You’re Right About the Hallway

Responding to:

“Jamie Dimon says remote work breeds ‘rope-a-dope politics’ and stunts young workers’ growth,” Fortune, originally published March 25, 2026 (resurfaced June 2026). fortune.com

With reference to: Satya Nadella, “A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable,” posted to X, June 14, 2026. x.com/satyanadella

Jamie, you’re right. I want to lead with that, because most people in my line of work are supposed to argue with you, and on this one I won’t.

You told a room at the Hill and Valley Forum that young people can’t learn from their basements. They learn, you said, by going on the sales call. By watching you make a mistake. By watching how you handle it. You called for an apprentice system. You said the conversation in the hallway after the meeting — the one that never happens on a video call — is where the real knowledge gets passed down, and that its absence shows up years later.

I spent thirty-six years on factory floors on two continents. By my experience, every word of how one learns through proximity to the teacher, is true.

I watched it happen ten thousand times. A new hire stands at a station and cannot yet feel the difference between a weld that will hold and one that will fail. Six months beside the right veteran and her hands know it before her eyes do — a sound, a smell, a half-second hesitation that says stop. Nobody wrote that down. Nobody could. It passed from one body to another exactly the way you’re describing: proximity, repetition, the freedom to watch someone who knows.

Formation is real. It is the slow handoff of judgment from the person who has it to the person who doesn’t, and it happens through nearness, repetition, and the freedom to fail up close. You can’t download it. You can’t Zoom it. It compounds inside a human being over years, and it is the most valuable thing a young worker will ever build. On that, there is no daylight between us.

Here is where we part.

You will move heaven and earth to make that formation happen — for bankers. You’ll mandate five days in the office. You’ll carry real estate most countries couldn’t afford. You overrode a petition signed by twelve hundred of your own people because you believe, correctly, that proximity builds the next generation of capability, and that capability is worth more than anyone’s commute.

Now walk that same logic onto my floor.

The line worker learns the way your analyst does — beside a veteran, by watching, by failing in front of someone who has seen it before. The nurse’s aide learns it at the bedside. The framer learns it on the wall. Formation-through-proximity isn’t your insight about offices, Jamie. It is the oldest truth on the factory floor, and we were living it before JPMorgan had a logo.

The difference is what we let happen next.

I know a man — I’ll use his name, Jason Blackie — who spent a decade on a line doing supervisor-level work. He was formed exactly the way you want your young bankers formed: next to people who knew more than he did, absorbing judgment no classroom teaches. When something went sideways at two in the morning — a line down, a tolerance drifting, a new kid frozen at his station — it was Jason people went to find, not the supervisor whose name sat on the org chart. He had the answer because he had the decade. He just never had the title. He could not be promoted, because the system that decides who counts as “capable” doesn’t read the floor. It reads the credential. Jason’s formation was real. It just wasn’t his to bank.

That is the half you left out. And here is what should stop you: you are not the only one who left it out this month.

The same week your remarks went around again, Satya Nadella published an essay — “A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable” — arguing that in the AI economy a company wins not by renting the best model but by owning the learning loop where its people’s judgment compounds. He even reached for the word I’ve built my life around: compound. He wrote that you can hand off a task, or even a whole job, but you can never offload the learning itself. He’s right. And then, in the very same breath, he named that compounding learning “the new IP of the firm.”

Read the two of you side by side and something jumps off the page. In a single week, two of the most powerful men in the American economy independently described capability as the thing that compounds, the thing that outranks the machine, the thing worth reorganizing an entire company around. And you both stopped at the same word. You both said capability compounds. Neither of you would say whose.

You locate it in the firm. Nadella files it under the firm’s intellectual property. The worker who actually does the compounding — in whose hands, in whose nervous system, in whose hard-won judgment the capability physically lives — appears in both your accounts as an input. A resource the firm captures. A cost that throws off a return for somebody else.

Let me offer you the word you are both missing. Not human capital — that’s the firm’s name for a worker entered on the firm’s own balance sheet. Capability capital. The capability a person builds through formation is capital, and it belongs to the person who carries it — exactly the way the capability your young banker builds belongs to her when she walks it out your door to a hedge fund three years from now. That is the whole reason you fight to keep her. You already know formation follows the human, not the firm. You have simply never extended that accounting to the people at the bottom, whose formation is every bit as real and is treated as if it evaporates the moment they c