How DBS Bank Makes Everyone an Innovator

DBS Bank believes that innovation is critical to its survival, and to reinforce that objective, it made innovation a KPI representing 20% of every team and individual’s performance review.

In this episode of Leaders at All Levels, hosts Katherine W. Isaacs and Michele Zanini speak with Bidyut Dumra, group head of innovation and future of work at DBS, to learn how he’s helped turn innovation from a top-down mandate to one that actually grows from the bottom up. DBS organized its entire operating model around cross-functional “customer journey” teams, led by what Dumra calls “mini CEOs” who have the authority and funding to make real decisions to meet customers’ needs.

Dumra also explains how one customer’s credit card loss sparked an insight that changed everything: Customers don’t think in terms of processes; they think in terms of intents. That single moment, he said, launched the journey-based model that now drives the bank’s organization and growth.

The DBS Playbook: Borrow These Ideas

• DBS benchmarks itself against tech leaders Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn, and Facebook instead of other banks, with the goal of being “digital to the core.”
• DBS’s transformation team has a playbook and training at the ready to help teams achieve their KPIs. “The skilling is available to every employee,” Dumra said.
• Some of the bank’s products launched without a business case, with the case built retrospectively, one year after launch. “[If] I know exactly what’s going to happen, I’m not really pushing the needle,” Dumra said.

Hosts Issacs and Zanini dig into how DBS makes distributed leadership work at scale — and what you can borrow from their playbook.

Video Credits

Bidyut Dumra is the group head of innovation and future of work at DBS Bank.

Kate W. Isaacs is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Michele Zanini is coauthor of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Humanocracy (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

M. Shawn Read is the multimedia editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.