JPMorgan Chase introduced on Thursday that it might promote two executives to newly created co-president roles amid CEO Jamie Dimon’s succession plan. Marianne Lake, the CEO of JPMorgan’s shopper and group banking division and a possible successor of Dimon, has left the corporate.
Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh, the brand new co-presidents, are not any strangers to sharing energy. Since 2024, the 2 have co-led JPMorgan’s industrial and funding banking divisions. Now, Petno will tackle being the one chief government of the industrial and funding banking division, whereas Rohrbaugh will take over Lake’s place to guide the patron and group banking division. Each acquired onetime retention and continuity awards of $30 million, in line with a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.
In a press release, Dimon stated that the choice “displays the Board’s confidence in [Petno’s and Rohrbaugh’s] extraordinary management capabilities, enterprise efficiency, relationships, expertise, and dedication to all the time doing the appropriate factor.”
With the co-president appointment, the wait to see who will take over as CEO of the world’s largest financial institution by market cap simply obtained a bit of longer. In February, at a JPMorgan investor day in New York Metropolis, Dimon said he would stay on the firm “for a couple of years as CEO, and perhaps a few after that, as government chairman.”
“That is the largest job in banking,” Michael Useem, a professor of administration on the College of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Faculty of Enterprise, tells Quick Firm. “These larger corporations, the complexity and variety of issues they’ve are simply unbelievable,” he provides.
“In consequence, if you happen to obtained two individuals who can sit, speak, shortly react—it doesn’t get higher than that.”
Margarethe Wiersema, a professor on the UC Irvine Paul Merage Faculty of Enterprise, says that JPMorgan’s co-president announcement provides a transparent pipeline that reassures traders and helps the corporate’s stability. “It’s all the time higher to have extra choices than to have only one,” Wiersema tells Quick Firm, including that the corporate is “on an excellent path.”
However that’s not all the time the case with firm succession plans, Wiersema says. Firms are inclined to have poor succession plans, which might harm their enterprise and fear traders. As the typical CEO tenure fell to a low of seven.2 years between the primary and third quarters of 2025, corporations with no clear succession plans might find yourself blindsided by their very own lack of preparation. Earlier this 12 months, Heineken confronted a bind when CEO Dolf van den Brink stepped down with no clear successor and stress from traders to hire an outsider for the primary time.
Whereas Petno and Rohrbaugh will lead totally different divisions underneath their co-president titles, competition can come up amongst leaders who function underneath co-CEO titles, which Wiersema calls “a distinct animal.”
“If it isn’t articulated forward of time as to who does what, you then’re going to have a battle,” Wiersema says. “Any individual has to say, ‘you care for this, and I care for that.’ There may be this difficulty of who actually is the CEO of the corporate.”
Lindred Greer, a professor on the College of Michigan’s Ross Faculty of Enterprise, says that the dearth of readability about “who does what and how one can get issues carried out” in a co-leadership state of affairs can doubtlessly result in energy struggles. The “energy dynamic is inherently unstable and vulnerable to battle,” Greer tells Quick Firm.
Nonetheless, the numbers provide some optimism for the co-leadership mannequin: In keeping with an analysis of 87 public corporations run by co-CEOs between 1996 and 2020, shared management generated common annual shareholder returns of 9.5%, in contrast with a 6.9% common for solo CEOs.
However the historical past of co-leadership can also be blended, and has taken totally different shapes throughout industries through the years.
Through the 2008 monetary disaster, Goldman Sachs’s Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried served as co-presidents and co-COOs. From November 2021 to January 2023, Salesforce operated underneath a co-CEO mannequin—however internal tension brought about Bret Taylor to step down, leaving Marc Benioff as the corporate’s sole CEO. During the last 12 months, Oracle, Comcast, and Spotify have all operated under the co-CEO structure.
JPMorgan has as an alternative constructed a “succession contest slightly than shared management,” David Grossman, CEO of inner communications company The Grossman Group, tells Quick Firm. To traders, this alerts that the succession plan is lastly transferring and narrowing in on two finalists, albeit with no clear timeline.
“The catch is the half that stays out of the press launch,” Grossman says. “There is no such thing as a end date but. Following Dimon is without doubt one of the hardest jobs in enterprise, and naming two contenders doesn’t make the ultimate name simpler. It simply schedules it.”
The price of this succession contest is the “expertise that decides to not wait round for the consequence,” Grossman says. “Each time a board elevates two individuals, it sends a message to everybody who was handed over, and the strongest of them begin taking calls,” he provides. “Marianne Lake leaving the identical day is the primary instance, and he or she is probably not the final.”
That may trickle right down to the remainder of the corporate, too.
“A corporation copies the connection on the high,” Grossman says. “Arrange a contest, and other people decide a aspect and begin enjoying it.”
