Do Your Thing summary

Most organizations treat purpose as a communications exercise. They draft statements that sound universal and carefully vetted, then post them on websites and walls. Years later, few employees can repeat them, and even fewer see them reflected in daily decisions.

Real purpose operates as a strategic anchor. It’s the North Star that guides how thousands of people across continents make trade-offs and move together without needing constant direction from above.

When a new operations chief walked through ING’s business units in the late 2010s, he noticed something the leadership team had missed: technology wasn’t the bottleneck. Fragmentation was – every country ran its own systems, its own apps, its own way of doing things, quietly draining the bank’s ability to compete with digital-first rivals. ING leadership quickly realized that the whole organization had to agree on building foundations everyone could use together.

That commitment became the blueprint for ING’s transformation. Rather than chasing flashy features, leadership focused on unglamorous groundwork. Leaders moved core systems off aging mainframes and into the cloud, consolidated scattered software into standardized platforms, and replaced tangled, manual connections between systems with APIs and modular microservices. Teams began storing reusable components in a shared library, so a solution built in one country didn’t need to be rebuilt from scratch elsewhere. Reusing what already existed, rather than starting over each time, quietly became the engine behind faster delivery and lower costs across the whole organization.

If you want an organization to change, you need the people involved to understand what needs changing and why. The best way to do this is to make them see it with their own eyes. 

When ING leaders were having an argument about how unified the organization truly was, one executive covered the wall in 84 different payment card designs in circulation at the time. The cards showed different shades of orange, different fonts, even different takes on the company’s lion logo. Leadership had assumed ING operated as one company. Yet the single visual of the wall made the case for change more powerfully than any strategy memo could.

In 2018, ING’s CEO stood in the heart of Poland’s coal country to make an announcement no bank had made before. He pledged that ING would hold itself accountable for the emissions tied to everything it financed, backed by hard data rather than good intentions. 

Inside the bank, plenty of people thought it was reckless. Commercial teams worried major clients would walk. But leadership moved forward anyway, betting that a credible, transparent stance would eventually pull others along rather than push them away.