This summer, Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, has been trundling across the US heartland in a bus. Yes, you read that right: while Dimon might normally flit around on a corporate jet, he spent part of July with his top managers in a coach, visiting the West Coast and the Rockies to listen to real-life customers and staff.

“We wanted to go off the beaten path — go to call centres, operating centres, do town halls and talk to tellers, loan officers, branch managers, whoever,” Dimon recently told me in a meeting at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, during a brief break from his trip. “So we brought local staff into this bus and gave them beer — and immunity — to hear what they had to say. Then we talked to customers too.”

“You cannot run a company from the corporate air,” he added. “You have to do something like this, to get down on the ground and hear what people are saying. So we have the bus.”