Bidyut Dumra
Confidence 0.70 · 1 source · last confirmed 2026-06-19
Group Head of Innovation and Future of Work at DBS Bank. Dumra joined DBS from outside the banking industry (previously at Cathay Pacific); the CEO’s stated hiring logic was that DBS already had 39,000 bankers and needed someone with “not the ability to think different but the ability to get other people to think different.” He describes his own background as zero-to-one and his contribution as “a healthy dose of unreasonableness … if you do want to push for change, push for differentiation, sometimes you’ve got to look beyond reality.”
Dumra owns DBS’s innovation operating system — Managing Through Journeys, the Innovation Pyramid, mini-CEO dynamic funding, and the playbook model that cascades a 20%-of-scorecard transformation KPI to every employee. See DBS Bank for the full system and the MIT SMR interview for his account.
Signature ideas
- GANDALF / “the D in GANDALF” — re-framing DBS’s competition as big tech (Google, Amazon, Netflix, DBS, Apple, LinkedIn, Facebook).
- “A customer is beyond a process — it’s an intent” — the insight behind Managing Through Journeys.
- Information gap → action gap — “It used to be you needed an information gap before you had the action gap. The information gap is gone. Now you’re just left with the action gap.”
- “Don’t tone it down. Turn it up.” — organisations underestimate people’s receptiveness to change.
- “There is no right way, but there is a wrong way — and the wrong way is to do nothing.”
Wiki sources
- 2026-06-18-dumra-mit-smr-dbs-everyone-an-innovator — MIT SMR Leaders at All Levels Ep. 9 (interview subject).