Disrupt Yourself Before Someone Else Beats You to It

The following is adapted from Do Your Thing by Ralph Hamers.

On September 29, 2013, I stood in front of ING's top 200 leaders and gave my first speech as incoming CEO. The message was simple: time's up. Technology wasn't just reshaping industries. It was wiping them off the map. Kodak. The record labels. These weren't slow declines. They were two-year disappearing acts, and the executives running those businesses never saw it coming.

I wasn't there to pitch better tools or shinier apps. My pitch was bigger: forget improving what we already do, and start imagining a completely different bank. We had to be willing to take a hammer to our own business before someone else swung first. If we wouldn't cannibalize ourselves, we'd shrink slowly into irrelevance, sanding down the edges of an outdated model while neobanks built new ones from scratch.

ING Direct gave us a head start. As a challenger brand in several countries, it had already shown us what a bolder model could look like. Small-screen banking, intuitive digital experiences, straight-through processing. These weren't bells and whistles. They were leaps. To match that energy, I ditched the usual deck. My slides had no numbers, no tables, no text. Just images. A clean break from how ING used to talk to itself.

To make the threat real, I showed a single photo from the 2013 papal inauguration: a sea of people in St. Peter's Square, every arm raised, every phone recording. Not a camera in sight. Then I asked the room, where did the camera industry go? Next came Lady Gaga, who built a global fan army through social media, community, and direct engagement, sidestepping every traditional gatekeeper in the music business. Where did the record industry go?

These weren't gentle evolutions. They were ambushes. And the same ambush was forming around us. Neobanks were launching. Apple, Google, and Amazon were circling payments. E-commerce was quietly embedding finance into checkout flows. If we didn't stay close to customers and treat technology as a differentiator rather than a crutch, we'd be the next case study in someone else's keynote.

I deliberately didn't show up with a finished strategy. I wanted to land in the middle of the conversation, not at the end of it. The workstreams I'd set up made sure the people who'd have to execute the strategy were the ones helping write it. My ask to the top 200 was bigger than a plan. I wanted them to imagine building a bank no one had ever built before.

The next morning, every leader woke up to a special alarm clock in their hotel room. No buzzer. Just a soft orange glow filling the room. It was our symbol: the sun rises orange every day. They carried those clocks home as a reminder that however hard the road got, we were the ones built to lead this transformation.

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For more advice on leading bold, technology-driven change, you can find Do Your Thing on Amazon.

Ralph Hamers is the former CEO of ING and UBS and a corporate advisor, tech investor, and board chair. At ING, he completed the bank’s post-crisis restructuring and transformed ING into a leading digital primary bank in Europe. During this period, ING achieved accelerated primary customer growth, one of the lowest cost-to-income ratios in European banking, and was recognized with Global Finance’s Best Bank of the World award. As CEO of UBS, Ralph launched the One UBS strategy and played a central role in the rescue of Credit Suisse.

(Royalty free image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/online-shopping-with-mobile-payment-technology-29502358/, Credit: Julio Lopez)