Citi's Jane Fraser on Buffett's email rule: never reply in anger

Citi CEO Jane Fraser is taking Warren Buffett's email rule to heart: never reply in anger.

The first woman to lead a major U.S. bank shared two pieces of advice from Berkshire Hathaway's chairman at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event in February. Buffett's first rule, Fraser recalled: "You can always call them an a-hole tomorrow. Really good piece of advice. So, never in anger, respond to that email."

The second rule—criticize by category, praise by name—lands less cleanly but carries longer-term weight.

What did Buffett actually tell her?

Fraser joined Citigroup in 2004 after ten years at McKinsey, following stints as a mergers and acquisitions analyst starting in 1988 and an MBA at Harvard Business School. She rose to CEO in 2021, the first woman to lead a major Wall Street bank. She now sits atop a lender in the middle of a multiyear restructuring.

She applied the email rule when an activist investor began pressuring the bank. Fraser admitted her first instinct was a "very rude response" to the suggestion that she empathize with the agitator. Stepping back changed the trajectory of the dispute.

"I think empathy gives you a competitive edge because there's far too many people that don't try and understand the other perspective," she said.

Caveat: a CEO can afford a delayed reply that an entry-level analyst cannot.

Is Citi using the rule to fire people?

Yes, and Fraser is direct about it. Her cultural-removal push sits inside the broader restructuring now underway at the bank.

"Good people in a bad culture, they'll go back to being good people again and fix the culture," Fraser said. "But if an a-hole's always an a-hole, and it's amazing how that just drains energy."

Citi declined to add further comment when Fortune reached out. The bank has not disclosed how many departures stem from the attitude cleanup, leaving the scale of the effort unverified by independent data. Fraser's framing also sidesteps a question—who decides who counts as the a-hole, and on what criteria?

What does this mean for Gen Z?

Roughly six in 10 companies have already fired some of their new young hires, citing lapses in professionalism, organization, and communication. Fraser's blunt framework offers a near-textbook entry-level playbook.

"Just don't be a jerk to people," Fraser said.

Two other chief executives have pushed the same message at recent public forums:

• Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, told LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky: "An embarrassing amount of how well you do, particularly in your twenties, has to do with attitude."
• Carl Eschenbach, former CEO of Workday, said on McKinsey's Inside the Strategy Room podcast in 2025: "The attitude that you bring to the office—and to your employees, your peers, and the people you serve alongside every day—is what ultimately will determine a lot of your success. I often say your altitude in life is completely determined by your attitude in life."

The shared emphasis spans banking, retail, and enterprise software. None of the three executives, however, cited a metric tying attitude to measurable career outcomes, leaving the central claim empirically unproven by their own evidence. The advice is also entirely self-reported, with no peer-reviewed or longitudinal data behind it.

The takeaway: Buffett's email rule survives because it costs nothing, fits on a Post-it, and can be applied by Monday morning—whether or not it ever moves the needle on performance.