JPMorgan Chase introduced on Thursday that it could 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 neighborhood banking division and a possible successor of Dimon, has left the corporate.
Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh, the brand new co-presidents, aren’t any strangers to sharing energy. Since 2024, the 2 have co-led JPMorgan’s business and funding banking divisions. Now, Petno will tackle being the one chief govt of the business and funding banking division, whereas Rohrbaugh will take over Lake’s place to steer the patron and neighborhood banking division. Each obtained onetime retention and continuity awards of $30 million, in accordance 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 proper 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 little bit longer. In February, at a JPMorgan investor day in New York Metropolis, Dimon said he would stay on the firm “for just a few years as CEO, and perhaps a few after that, as govt chairman.”
“That is the most important job in banking,” Michael Useem, a professor of administration on the College of Pennsylvania’s Wharton College of Enterprise, tells Quick Firm. “These greater firms, the complexity and variety of considerations they’ve are simply unbelievable,” he provides.
“Because of this, in case you obtained two individuals who can sit, speak, rapidly react—it doesn’t get higher than that.”
Margarethe Wiersema, a professor on the UC Irvine Paul Merage College of Enterprise, says that JPMorgan’s co-president announcement gives a transparent pipeline that reassures buyers 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 may damage their enterprise and fear buyers. As the typical CEO tenure fell to a low of seven.2 years between the primary and third quarters of 2025, firms with no clear succession plans may 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 buyers to hire an outsider for the primary time.
Whereas Petno and Rohrbaugh will lead totally different divisions underneath their co-president titles, rivalry can come up amongst leaders who function underneath co-CEO titles, which Wiersema calls “a special animal.”
“If it isn’t articulated forward of time as to who does what, then you definately’re going to have a battle,” Wiersema says. “Any person has to say, ‘you maintain this, and I maintain that.’ There may be this concern of who actually is the CEO of the corporate.”
Lindred Greer, a professor on the College of Michigan’s Ross College of Enterprise, says that the dearth of readability about “who does what and how you can get issues executed” in a co-leadership state of affairs can doubtlessly result in energy struggles. The “energy dynamic is inherently unstable and susceptible to battle,” Greer tells Quick Firm.
Nevertheless, the numbers supply some optimism for the co-leadership mannequin: In line with an analysis of 87 public firms 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 be blended, and has taken totally different shapes throughout industries over time.
Throughout 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 triggered Bret Taylor to step down, leaving Marc Benioff as the corporate’s sole CEO. Over the past 12 months, Oracle, Comcast, and Spotify have all operated under the co-CEO structure.
JPMorgan has as an alternative constructed a “succession contest reasonably than shared management,” David Grossman, CEO of inside communications company The Grossman Group, tells Quick Firm. To buyers, this indicators 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 isn’t any end date but. Following Dimon is likely 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 outcome,” Grossman says. “Each time a board elevates two folks, 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 might not be the final.”
That may trickle all the way down to the remainder of the corporate, too.
“A corporation copies the connection on the high,” Grossman says. “Arrange a contest, and other people choose a aspect and begin taking part in it.”
