What They’re Made of: Secrets and Stories of Leaders on the Edge

By Alexandra Lamb

The Harvard Alumni Clubs of the Philippines, in collaboration with John Clements Consultants, Inc. and other esteemed business associations, kicked off the first in a series of talks entitled “What They’re Made of: Secrets and Stories of Leaders on the Edge”, a series on courageous leadership moderated by Harvard Business School Professor Ranjay Gulati. A global authority on leadership in turbulent times, Ranjay has studied and written about this topic for the past twenty-five years. Known as a masterful interviewer, he has taught senior leaders around the world using the Harvard Case Study Methodology and has interviewed over 150 CEOs in classroom settings. He is also the author of Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies.

The first in this series of talks featured Piyush Gupta, the Chief Executive Officer and Director of DBS Group since 2009. Piyush was named one of the world’s top 100 best-performing executives in Harvard Business Review’s “The CEO 100”. In 2020, he was awarded the Public Service Star by the President of Singapore for his meritorious services to the nation. He was named Global Indian of the Year by the Economic Times in 2021, Singapore Business Awards’ Outstanding Chief Executive of the Year in 2016, and the Singapore Business Leaders of the Year by CNBC in 2014.

Ranjay started his interview by asking how Piyush managed to navigate DBS during this challenging pandemic and to share some of his key moments in the last 3 years. Piyush admitted that they were already going through a digital transformation journey well before the pandemic began, so they were prepared when it hit. However, he shared some of the key challenges they encountered:

1. Reallocation of talent and resources — how to reskill, upskill and realign their human capital and available resources.
2. How to deal with clients who were economically challenged, and how to face the reality of the customer’s cash challenges. Thankfully, the Singapore government stepped in with a very robust support program to keep the economy afloat.
3. How to sustain and support the mental health, mental fatigue and loneliness of their employees, the challenge of keeping them engaged.

Piyush also shared that the challenges he perceives in the next decade is that of philosophy — what is the right thing to do. He mentioned the 3 key challenges under this umbrella:

1. Exclusion/Inclusion — how do you strike a balance between those who still need traditional banking such as the elderly, illiterate, etc.; versus those that have adopted banking in the digital world.
2. Question of whether data was a catalyst for exclusion — when is information too much? An example he raised was in the insurance industry, where too much data, such as possessing a cancer gene, would exclude the customer from availing coverage for that illness.
3. AI could be advantageous and efficient; however, could also be detrimental — it challenges the lack of human intervention, and human empathy.

Transformation Journey of DBS

Piyush shared some of the learnings from their transformation journey:

1. Culture Change is not easy — there is a natural human resistance to change. However, they realized that there is no limit on human capacity to change.
2. Executing strategy is very important, and not just paying lip service. You have to walk the talk.
3. How can they stay relevant to society? They must adopt a customer-centric and customer-obsessive approach. They have to be dedicated to putting the customer at the center of their business.
4. It is critical to get emotional buy-in from their customer by being respectful, easy to work with and by being dynamic.
5. Implement Change by Design:

• In order to be a true digital company, they must be a tech company first, then a bank
• They have to possess a customer journey obsession
• They must create a start-up culture and mindset by being agile, innovative and taking risks

What were some of the incentives they offered to create that Culture Change?

1. Espouse a culture of learning. Make it easy to learn. Give them the tools. Create an environment to solve problems; i.e. hackathons.
2. Encourage employees to be risk-takers. Reward people for thinking out of the box, trying new ways of doing things, and for putting in the effort.
3. Inspire and support an agile and efficient mentality.

Ranjay asked how he has evolved to be a successful leader. Piyush shared that he has made a big change in his leadership style over the years. He used to be a “helicopter” leader: very strategic and very directive. Sometimes a leader has to be directive. He didn’t understand how to be collaborative. But he learned that there is only so much one person can do. He realized that the energy and power come from the bottom up. He started instituting a collaborative leadership and horizontal management style. To be a successful leader, there has to be collaboration, trust, agility and a growth mindset.

What are the key takeaways in this “Next Normal”?

1. The pandemic accelerated the change but the change already started before the pandemic.
2. Digital natives are the younger generation who are at ease with digital platforms. They demand personalization and efficiency.
3. Exponential growth in technology will create borderless economies, explosion of machine learning, especially in the consumption of data and the creation of hybrid everything, i.e. physical vs digital.

DBS has taken the long view that the customer experience is their top priority. They continue to focus on putting the customer at the center of their business, and to create products and services that fit this mold.

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About the author:

Alexandra is the Business Development Director for Leadership Development and Transformation at John Clements Consultants, Inc.