In those very, very early days you want people who are there for the mission above all. You’re looking for passion, enthusiasm, and mindset. And you’re looking for seed crystals. Seed crystals are people who are so good and so well loved that they can almost single-handedly build large parts of your org. Typically they’re experienced leaders, either managers of large teams or super-ICs who everyone listens to. Once they’re in, a tidal wave of other awesome people will typically follow.

That’s how we built our core team at Nest. We sought out the best of the best, and they created their own gravity—pulling in more and more talent.

I remember looking around the office in those early days with my mentor, the gritty, boisterous, wise Bill Campbell. We stood there just grinning.

I first met Bill when he was on the board of directors at Apple. I got in touch again when I needed help as I was starting Nest. I remember he looked directly into my eyes with a dead stare, watching for any microexpressions, and asked, “Are you coachable?” Which meant, “Will you listen? Are you ready to learn?” That was the only qualification you needed to be coached by Bill—the ability to admit that you don’t know everything. That you’re going to screw up. And that you’re ready to learn from those screwups, listen to advice, and act on it.

In summary, growing a business is a dynamic process as the leadership team navigates the evolutions and revolutions of growth. And like the growth stages of a child, they are predictable and unavoidable. To deal with these challenges, the company must grow the capabilities of the leadership team throughout the organization; install scalable infrastructure to manage the increasing complexities that come with growth; and stay on top of the

market dynamics that affect the business.

To do this, there are 4 Decisions that leaders must address: People, Strategy,

Execution, and Cash.

This involved really pushing himself to boil down his vision for the company’s guiding mission into highly persuasive and memorable words, such as creative collaboration and accelerating document productivity. “I obsess over that,” he said, stressing the importance of “learning the power of the written word, because if you get that right, your message will flow off the tongue, you’ll use it with passion.” Then, he emphasized, people will be inspired to rise to the occasion and interpret the guidance as best suits the products or services they’re working on.

For acquisition, he shared, “We would look at almost anything that came up within the industry for sale, and we had four factors that drove our decisions. One, we would only buy number one or two share brands in their category. We did not believe we could take a dying brand and turn it around. Two, we wanted to buy businesses that had higher gross margin than out company average, so would help our gross margin. Three, we looked for asset-light companies. We didn’t want to buy a company with lots of factories or ones for which we’d have to build new factories. We preferred to bring operations into our own facilities. And four, we went for products that had some sort of advantage versus the competition that we could leverage with our marketing, sales, and operations muscle to make better.” That formula guided the well-measured acquisition of numerous leading brands during his tenure, including Spinbrush, OxiClean, Orajel, Batiste, and Vitafusion. These were businesses that his own business leaders had the expertise to run, and he folded them into Church & Dwight’s existing operations. Focusing on employees with R&D expertise, they kept, on average, only 10 percent of employees, many of whom joined the team at headquarters. “We doubled the size of the company,” he reported, without adding substantially to the number of employees.

The perceived wisdom then,” he recalled, was that DBS should create a separate division for digital banking or buy a fintech start-up. “We took a contrary view. We were going to bring everyone along. Our battle cry was that we were going to become a twenty-thousand-person start-up.” He invested heavily in retraining existing employees and hired a phalanx of data scientists. To engage employees in the mission, he launched regular hackathons and he set a goal of conducting one thousand experiments a year.

With a strong focus on optimizing the potential of artificial intelligence, he had to pour himself into learning about the technology. One way he did so was to take part in a global competition called DeepRacer hosted by Amazon Web Services. Participants must program a self-driving model car that they race on a track, and competitors with the fastest time then compete in a showdown. From this endeavor, not only did Gupta learn more of the ins and outs of AI development but his participation also inspired employees throughout the organization to embrace the reinvention. Three thousand DBS employees participated, and out of them, Gupta came nineteenth in the race. DBS won the competition for the Asian region, and three of its employees participated in the grand finale held in Las Vegas.

The result of Gupta’s constant push for innovation is that DBS was named best bank in the world by Global Finance magazine, not just that once in 2018 but every year thereafter, for five years in a row as of this writing.