Good morning from Las Vegas. During day two of the Adobe Summit on Wednesday, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon touched on tariffs, the economy, and geopolitics, and he also gave some insight into what he considers effective leadership.

“I have to confess, I’m not used to speaking in front of 12,000 people,” Dimon told the audience of marketers, practitioners, and executives. 

During the fireside chat, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen asked Dimon what helped him develop as a leader, to which he responded, “I think there are four quick things.”

His first piece of advice: “Assess everything, honestly, directly, forthrightly. A lot of companies don’t do that.” Companies that don’t follow those guidelines are not honest about their performance, and get complacent, he said. “Don’t try to use numbers to prove what you think,” he said. “Try to use numbers to understand what you are doing.”

Secondly, you need an effective leadership team. “A lot of people who run stuff, they’re like a hot mess,” Dimon said. Always late and not doing their job, he said. “They may be great people, just don’t let them run something because they’ll be a disaster,” he added.

Dimon’s third piece of advice is to have humility. “People know when you care about them,” he said. “They know if you’re real.” And people know when you’re not genuine, he added. You wouldn’t want to work with someone who blames everyone else if something goes wrong, and takes credit when things go right, Dimon explained. Or someone who “doesn’t treat everyone across the company with respect, whether it’s the person cleaning the bathrooms in the office or a CEO,” he said.

His fourth leadership tip: “You’ve gotta have a little bit of grit.” Especially when you’re managing things that are coming at you all day. “You have to say ‘absolutely not,’ or ‘absolutely, take the chance—go for it,’” he said.

Driving innovation

Dimon is at the helm of the nation’s largest bank, which manages $4 trillion in assets and moves over $10 trillion around the world every day. With the bank having about 300,000 employees, Narayen asked him what he thinks about innovation for a company of that scale.

Technology has driven change for mankind, Dimon said. It has influenced everything from agriculture, printing, steel, ceramics, the internet, and “I put AI in the same category,” he said.

Technological innovation should be brought to the table for leadership to discuss, Dimon said. Lori Beer, global chief information officer at JPMorgan Chase, “who runs an empire,” reports to Dimon and the president, he said. When they come to the table, Dimon asks questions like: “What are you doing? What are you building? How are you competing? How are you using new technology? How are you using Adobe?”

The bank has expanded into lifestyle businesses, like Chase Travel. “We have a travel agency to make your life better,” Dimon said. “And unlike some other companies out there in social media, we want to offer you what you want,” and not “just bombard you with ads,” he said.

And Dimon offered another piece of advice: “A business should always look at itself from the point of view of the consumer.”

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Barely a month ago, a phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin sent an unmistakable message across the Atlantic: the United States may not be there forever to keep Europe safe from an aggressive Russia.

By the time the pair spoke again this week, a whirlwind of diplomacy had seen Europe juggle alliances and rewrite long-held rules — with a show of assertiveness not always associated with the Old Continent.

“The advent of the Trump administration has given history a shove, and concentrated minds about what needs to be done,” summed up Ian Lesser of the German Marshall Fund think tank.

Here is a look at the shifts taking place — and what might lie ahead — as the 27-nation European Union holds on Thursday its third summit in six weeks aimed at ramping up its defences.

‘New actors’

From Brussels to Paris to London and back to Brussels — the frenzy of diplomacy sparked by Trump’s outreach to Moscow over Ukraine has blurred a number of lines.

Back-to-back meetings have involved sub-groups of countries from in and outside the EU, and for the bloc’s formal talks, “likeminded” partners from Britain to Canada have been kept in the loop, as they will be again this week.

More often than not, NATO’s secretary general has joined in, intent on acting as a bridge with the new US administration.

The shifting formats highlight the challenge posed by Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who is friendly to both Trump and Russia and has repeatedly held up unanimous EU action on Ukraine.

For the second time running, leaders expect to settle in Brussels on a 26-nation statement to sidestep what a senior EU official termed the “strategic divergence” with Orban over the conflict.

From big tent to close-knit huddle, the flexibility also reflects the shape of the “coalition of the willing” emerging around Ukraine, and the complexities of bolstering Europe’s defences longer-term.

“It’s clear that a Europe that takes defence, not just more seriously, but more autonomously, is going to want to include new actors including Britain, Norway but also Turkey,” said Lesser, who also sees a chance of a “stronger European pole” within NATO emerging in times ahead.

Old friends

Britain’s move back towards Europe is one of the most striking consequences of America’s disengagement, even as a formal bid to rekindle ties post-Brexit showed signs of floundering.

Old gripes were bubbling up again between London and some European capitals accusing it of cherry-picking in its “reset” push — and EU insiders still believe any broad agreement will be difficult.

But British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has emerged as a key player in European efforts to keep the United States engaged, secure a hoped-for ceasefire in Ukraine, and get serious about the continent’s own security.

“This has really helped turn a page with the United Kingdom,” said Camille Grand, policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Both sides are realising that, when it comes down to it, we can come together around the things that truly matter.”

In the short term, Grand still predicts a tussle over “who gets access to Europe’s cash for rearmament”, with “buy European” provisions baked into a 150-billion-euro ($163-billion) loan programme presented this week.

But Britain could come in on the project if it signs a security deal with the EU.

And with Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron working in lockstep on a Ukraine coalition, that bolsters the case of those seeking closer EU-UK cooperation on security at least.

Rules be damned?

The prospect of losing US security protection has also triggered a minor earthquake involving the EU’s sacrosanct budget deficit rules.

Brussels now wants the fiscal rules put on hold for four years to unlock potential defence spending worth 650 billion euros, to nods from countries who would once have howled in protest.

Calls to go further and overhaul those same rules have emanated from historically reluctant spender Germany — itself tearing up decades of precedent by backing a defence spending “bazooka” pushed by leader-in-waiting Friedrich Merz.

More radical still, Merz has called for talks with France and Britain on a shared nuclear deterrent, while Poland’s Donald Tusk has shown interest in accessing atomic weapons.

“Many taboos have been shattered in recent weeks,” said Lesser, on everything from deterrence to finance.

The caveat? Influential Germany and the Netherlands remain firmly opposed to bigger EU joint borrowing on the scale deployed to overcome the Covid pandemic.

“Right now, it’s not there,” the bloc’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas acknowledged Wednesday. “But is it completely off the table? I don’t think so.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Newly released documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 gave curious readers more details Wednesday into Cold War-era covert U.S. operations in other nations but didn’t initially lend credence to long-circulating conspiracy theories about who killed JFK.

Assessments of the roughly 2,200 files posted by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration on its website came with a huge caveat: No one had enough time as of Wednesday to review more than a small fraction of them. The vast majority of the National Archives’ more than 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.

An initial Associated Press review of more than 63,000 pages of records released this week shows that some were not directly related to the assassination but rather dealt with covert CIA operations, particularly in Cuba. And nothing in the first documents examined undercut the conclusion that Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

“Nothing points to a second gunman,” said Philip Shenon, who wrote a 2013 book about the assassination. “I haven’t seen any big blockbusters that rewrite the essential history of the assassination, but it is very early.”

Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested the 24-year-old Oswald, a former Marine who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television.

Historians hope for new details about the man who killed JFK

A year after the assassination, the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate, concluded that Oswald acted alone and there was no evidence of a conspiracy. But critics of the commission still spun a web of alternative theories.

Historians are hoping for details fleshing out Oswald’s activities before the assassination and what the CIA and FBI knew about him beforehand.

Shenon pointed Wednesday to previously released documents about a trip Oswald made to Mexico City at the end of September 1963. Records show Oswald intended to contact the Soviet Union’s embassy there after living as a U.S. defector in the U.S.S.R. from October 1959 until June 1962.

Shenon said the U.S. government may have kept information about what it knew about Oswald before the assassination secret to hide what he described as officials’ possible “incompetence and laziness.”

“The CIA had Oswald under pretty aggressive surveillance while he was there and this was just several weeks before the assassination,” Shenon said. “There’s reason to believe he talked openly about killing Kennedy in Mexico City and that people overheard him say that.”

Speculation about such details surrounding Kennedy’s assassination has been intense over the decades, generating countless conspiracy theories about multiple shooters and involvement by the Soviet Union, the mafia and the CIA. The new release fueled rampant online speculation and sent people scurrying to read the documents and share online what they might mean.

Many documents already were public but information had been redacted

The latest release of documents followed an order by President Donald Trump, though most of the records were made public previously with redactions. Before Tuesday, researchers had estimated that 3,000 to 3,500 files were still unreleased, either wholly or partially. Last month, the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.

Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, said in a statement posted on the social platform X that much of the “rampant overclassification of trivial information has been eliminated” from the documents.

The timing of the release drew criticism from a Kennedy grandson, Jack Schlossberg. In a post on X, Schlossberg said the Trump administration did not notify family members before the records were made public.

“a total surprise, and not shocker !!” Schlossberg wrote.

Trump issued his executive order to release the files on Jan. 23.

A boon to historians of the Cold War

The latest release also is a boon to historians of the Cold War. Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who is writing a book about JFK’s presidency, said scholars now appear to have more details about U.S. intelligence activities under Kennedy than under any other president.

For example, in October 1975, U.S. senators were investigating what the CIA knew about Oswald, and an October 1975 memo said they considered the agency “not forthcoming.”

A version of that memo released in 2023 redacted the name of the CIA’s security contact on Oswald in Mexico, as well as the identity of someone behind the “penetration of the Cuban embassy” there. The latest version shows that the security contact was the president of Mexico in 1975, Luis Echeverria Alvarez, who died in 2022, and that the Mexican government itself penetrated the Cuban embassy.

Also, Naftali said, before the latest release, the government had made public copies of Johnson’s presidential “daily checklist” of highly sensitive foreign intelligence in the days after Kennedy’s assassination, but with much of the material redacted. Now, he said, people can read what Johnson read.

“It’s quite remarkable to be able to walk through that secret world,” he said.

Some records provide small details about covert operations

Documents show that in December 1963, the CIA director’s office was receiving messages from and replying to operatives in Cuba seeking to undermine the government under Fidel Castro. One, on Dec. 9, 1963, relayed a message to the director from Cuba: “TODAY RECD THE MAGNUM PISTOLS BUT NO BULLETS.”

“You’re getting both a bird’s-eye view of U.S. foreign policy, and you’re also getting a snail’s eye view of covert action, right there on the ground,” Naftali said.

In a previously released April 1975 memo, the CIA downplayed what it knew about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City before the assassination. The memo said the CIA recorded three phone calls between Oswald and a guard at the Soviet embassy, but only in the last one did Oswald identify himself.

“We’re now discovering how much more the CIA and the FBI knew before the assassination about Oswald,” Shenon said. “And the question is, why didn’t they act on the information in their own files?”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com