When Donald Keough took over as President and COO of Coca-Cola in 1981, one of the first things he did was walk the halls of the company’s headquarters to get to know the employees. He asked each what they did to help sell – you guessed it – Coca Cola.
One employee indicated that he did nothing, that he was in accounting. Keough didn’t take well to the response. His deeply held view was that everyone in the company’s employ had to know the products, and had to have a hand in selling them. Knowing Coke was a function of being at the office, and crucially getting out of the office in order to interact with fellow employees. Keough wanted them to know the business they were in.
Keough’s wise actions came to mind last week when J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon made it clear that employees were “wasting their time” with the circulation of a petition aimed at maintaining a more flexible work-from-home schedule. Dimon is right. Great companies have headquarters that employees show up to each day.
What’s important is that there’s quite simply no way to maintain a corporate culture that makes a company great when employees are scattered, dressing as they wish (if at all), all while showing up for work when they’re needed. Work is about doing more than is required. See above.
Employees need to be on campus, and they need to see what their fellow employees are doing each day as a way of helping to expand the reach of the business they’re in. If everyone’s somewhere else, and only expected to show up presentably on Zoom (Dimon notes that employees don’t pay attention on Zoom like they do when in the office), they and shareholders will be denied the growth that can only come from smart, energetic people improving one another by working with one another.
The obtuse notion underlying support for remote work inside and outside corporations is the insouciantly vicious belief that corporations have for all this time built headquarters and campuses just because, or as monuments to CEO grandiosity, and that shareholders have blithely signed on for such enormous waste. More realistically, ownership and management have long understood that people working together work exponentially more productively, and in doing so, they forge a corporate culture that delivers much greater shareholder returns.
The simple truth is that much more than a cost, employees are precious. And since they are, the great corporations are rightly going to want them to show up to work each day so that they can maximize their own potential (including earnings potential), and in doing so reward the shareholders who make what they do possible to begin with.
Which is plainly Dimon’s point, though in his case he grasps the importance of showing up for work on a much deeper level. Evidence supporting the previous claim can be found in the performance of J.P. Morgan on Dimon’s watch. About the latter, readers can rest assured that JPM’s success wasn’t nor could it ever be a function of atomized individuals off doing as they see fit, and without both collaboration and supervision.
Back to Coke, to meet an employee there today is to meet a passionate person; someone who will quite literally buy strangers Coca-Cola products if they’re seen purchasing the products of the competition. This is corporate culture, and it’s what Jamie Dimon is trying to maintain at J.P. Morgan.
