And now for something completely different

Well after nearly 5 years at DBS Bank it’s time to say goodbye and I must admit it was an incredibly hard decision for me to make. I think the playwright Thomas Meehan says it best – “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

During my time I have worked with some of the brightest minds in finance and will miss them dearly, but I won’t miss anyone as much as my team or as we refer to ourselves #teamawesome, the most passionate and creative people I have ever worked with.

I feel that any good test of leadership is about the legacy of the team they leave behind, and to this end DBS has promoted the innovation head of ecosystems, Bidyut Dumra to lead the innovation team and promoted the innovation management head Mark Evans to run the experience strategy team to take them to even higher levels of success.

As many of my followers and friends will know I have learnt a huge amount while at DBS and I have tried to share as much of this journey as I could through my various articles and talks and will continue to do the same for my new endeavours. Looking back across my time I feel some of the key things I learnt were:

Set ambitious goals

When I first joined, I was quite clear that I wanted to make DBS the worlds most innovative bank and I remember in the early days many people laughed at this but 5 years on there aren’t many that doubt that DBS is a top-flight finance innovator.

Innovation isn’t about inventing things

For me the role of an innovation leader is to create innovators, not apps. It’s about people not technology, if you can create inspire and educate the entire workforce to do their careers best work and to constantly strive to create the amazing then the company is unstoppable.

Be unreasonable

Never being happy with the status quo and having a generally high level of frustration with how the world works is key to making change. I am not a big believer in the mantra of “Don’t change the world, change yourself”. This world was created by people and people can change it again, highly relevant for these disruptive times.

Do what is needed, not necessarily what is wanted

This is a difficult one but try to focus on what the company needs rather than what the company wants and put the company’s future above your own career or bonus expectations. That’s not to say you never do what is expected but sometimes the company just knows what they want next and your role as an innovator is to think 2 or 3 steps ahead.

Now I’m sure you are asking, what are you up to next? Well as you would expect I am treading a different path. Some of you will know my passion for Orangutans and conservation and so will be spending time driving my social enterprises in Indonesia, the 2 beautiful hotels I have built Hotel Orangutan and Pulau Weh Paradise, one focused on land-based conservation and the other on ocean-based conservation. I will mainly be living at these when I am not travelling so hopefully you will be able to catch me there at one of the corporate innovation off-sites we run.

Secondly, I will be launching my book which is about building Hotel Orangutan and the philosophies I learnt from the jungle and how this was applied to my corporate innovation journey. You can find a short video on my Jungle innovation talk on YouTube.

Thirdly I am working as an advisor on several projects across Asia and beyond, many of them outside of banking and am really enjoying meeting new people and seeing new problems to solve, everything I have learnt while at DBS is not only valuable but also transportable to completely different industries.

And finally, I am going to join my good friend David Pettit in the neo-wealth finetch we started in Australia several years ago and will hold the chairman position of Picture Wealth, the fastest growing wealth fintech in Australia. We went from $0 to $100m of funds under management in just 6 months! 

So, thanks to everyone I have worked with at DBS but particularly to Paul Cobban, Dave Gledhill and Piyush Gupta, thanks for trusting me and giving me the space and air-cover to do my careers work.

DBS and the people within it have been very good to me from my first day to my last and I am very proud to have worked at the worlds best bank with all of you and I have no doubt that DBS will continue to be an innovation powerhouse.

So maybe it’s not goodbye but more of a so long, or in the words of the immortal Douglas Adams – “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”