Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Business heroes are in short supply. Finding a business-banker hero quickly takes us to “camel through the eye of a needle” territory.

During the past two years, disastrous losses, bad deals or bad behavior claimed the scalps of Stanley O’Neal and John Thain of Merrill Lynch & Co., Charles “Chuck” Prince of Citigroup Inc., James “Jimmy” Cayne of Bear Stearns Cos., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s Richard S. Fuld Jr., and, last week, Bank of America Corp.’s Kenneth D. Lewis.

Morgan Stanley’s John Mack (who plans to step down as chief executive officer on Jan. 1) and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. were both humbled when they were forced last year to turn their investment banks into bank holding companies.

Duff McDonald’s new biography, “Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase,” identifies one of the few executives with a positive story worth telling. Dimon, 53, has emerged from the recent financial crises with his reputation intact. He is banking and finance’s most successful, most trusted and most important leader.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., America’s second-largest bank by assets, has posted a profit every quarter since he became CEO in December 2005. His lifelong insistence on strong balance sheets enabled him to acquire Bear Stearns with government assistance in March 2008 and the assets of Washington Mutual Inc. following a federal takeover and subsequent auction six months later.

Two Stories

The book tells two stories. The first chronicles Dimon’s 16-year apprenticeship with Sandy Weill, whom he joined in 1982 at American Express Co. after rejecting more prestigious offers from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley. Weill, a friend of Dimon’s parents, had recently sold his Shearson Loeb Rhoades brokerage firm to American Express and had become chairman of Amex’s executive committee.

Weill quit American Express three years later. After more than a year of searching for deals together, Weill and Dimon bought Commercial Credit Co., a mundane, Baltimore-based consumer-finance company, from Control Data Systems Inc.

That purchase was followed by bold acquisitions including Primerica, Shearson Lehman, Travelers Corp. and Salomon Inc. Then, in 1998, Weill gained control of Citicorp after merging it with his financial conglomerate, then called Travelers Group Inc.

Deal-Making Skills

Dimon perfected his deal-making skills and became a voracious consumer of financial details in those years. He saw himself as Weill’s heir apparent and assumed he would become president of Citigroup Inc., the company formed by the Citicorp- Travelers merger. Instead, Weill fired Dimon, shocking him and the business world.

The second section of the book begins with Dimon’s years in Chicago, where he rescued Bank One Corp. after becoming its CEO in 2000, followed by his return to New York four years later as president of J.P. Morgan Chase, after it acquired Bank One. He became CEO the following year. It was during his time in Chicago that Dimon first met many of the civic leaders who now populate the administration of President Barack Obama.

The latter part of the book deals extensively with the takeover of Bear Stearns and with Dimon’s calm under pressure last autumn when Lehman collapsed, almost bringing down the rest of Wall Street with it. It is during this period that Dimon fully morphs from dealmaker to visionary and industry spokesman.

Passion for Business

McDonald captures Dimon’s passion for business -- his intensity, his mastery of detail, his competitiveness and his appealing preference for stream-of-consciousness explications. Unlike Weill, the quintessential one-man band, McDonald’s Dimon is a team player, able to meld JPMorgan’s extraordinary cast of all-stars from longtime associates, executives he inherited, and best-of-breed outsiders whom he lured to the bank. He can and does take responsibility for tough decisions, as he showed last week, when he fired a protege, London-based William Winters.

“Last Man Standing” is an easy, compelling read. McDonald’s fluid style masks a careful attention to detail that rivals that of his subject. The book benefits from his extensive interviews with Dimon, his family and friends -- interviews that help explain how Dimon’s rational and emotional sides coexist.

If the book has a problem, it’s one of timing, perhaps appearing too late and too early. Many of the book’s best stories have already appeared elsewhere.

Emotional Battles

Monica Langley’s riveting biography of Weill, “Tearing Down the Walls,” captures the early years of deal-making and the emotional battles between Weill and Dimon. William D. Cohan’s “House of Cards” covered JPMorgan’s takeover of Bear Stearns with such precision that McDonald has trouble finding a detail or anecdote that hasn’t already appeared in print.

For all his accomplishments, Dimon hasn’t run JPMorgan long enough to prove that his operating skills are as good as his deal-making prowess. He was smart enough to avoid the worst excesses that felled other financial institutions, and McDonald notes that Dimon got out of the subprime lending business before many of his rivals.

Even so, Dimon didn’t fully appreciate how the subprime mess would spread to the rest of the home-loan market, McDonald says. As a result, JPMorgan took big writedowns for poor housing loans and for leveraged corporate loans. JPMorgan could still hit serious speed bumps as the economy continues to struggle.

Dimon has given no indication that he plans to leave JPMorgan any time soon. A Democrat and Obama supporter, he is mentioned frequently as a possible successor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner or as a candidate for other Cabinet positions should they become open. McDonald suggests other possibilities, including teaching, investing, or, according to Dimon’s wife, opening his own restaurant and turning himself into Sam Malone of “Cheers.”

Dimon is young enough that “Last Man Standing” will certainly need updates. One can only hope that McDonald will want to write them.

“Last Man Standing” is published by Simon & Schuster in the U.S. (340 pages, $28). To buy this book in North America, click here.

(Norman Pearlstine is the chief content officer for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Norman Pearlstine in New York at npearlstine@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 5, 2009 19:00 EDT