We needed to become a truly global company. We were broad with our reach, doing business in numerous markets around the world, but we needed to better penetrate certain markets, particularly the world’s most populous countries, like China and India.

When I moved to Hong Kong at the start of 2017, I entertained the idea that we were living at the start of an “Asian Century,” in which China and India would restore Asia to the economically dominant role it played centuries ago. I didn’t believe it, necessarily. But it didn’t feel like a crazy scenario. Donald Trump, after all, had been shooting admiring glances at autocratic countries while unloading his petulance on Canada, Europe, as well as other American allies. Xi, by contrast, displayed a patient resolve to strengthen Chinese capabilities. Parts of that remain real, although now I have a better appreciation of China’s weaknesses. There are many things that China will be successful at, but I departed the country with a better appreciation of the self-limiting features of the Chinese system. Most notably, the Communist Party distrusts and fears the Chinese people, limiting their potential for flourishing.

Though Hay planned from the beginning to transition the company into largely renewable production, he shared with us at the time, “The vast majority of the players in our industry thought it was a fool’s errand. There was still skepticism as to whether renewables were just a fad and government incentives would go away.” In his first few years, he focused on bringing in a team of innovative thinkers with entrepreneurial experience. “We had some of the best utility people around,” he shared, “but they were very risk averse.

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.

In the past, primary emphasis was placed on financial and operations acumen— still, obviously, important— but today the vanguard of innovators in the sector increasingly appreciate a CEO’s people leadership skills for achieving the above-market returns investors expect.