Do Your Thing: Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation, by Ralph Hamers, is a book on business leadership, digital transformation, and banking management built around the reinvention of ING after the global financial crisis. Hamers takes readers from the bank’s years of government support, forced restructuring, layoffs, and battered employee confidence into the much more ambitious project of turning ING into a digital-first, customer-centered organization. What gives the story its energy is the scale of the undertaking as Hamers aspired to get tens of thousands of people across multiple countries to agree on what ING existed to do, how it would compete, how its leaders should behave, and what customers should actually experience.

The book’s central argument is that transformation comes from connecting all of those pieces and then staying remarkably consistent about them. That makes the ING story useful well beyond banking. Anyone interested in organizational change, business strategy, corporate culture, or transformation leadership will recognize the problem Hamers keeps returning to: having a vision is much easier than getting an enormous organization to live it every day.

The strongest parts of the book are where that big idea gets concrete. Hamers walks through the creation of the Think Forward strategy, ING’s purpose of “empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business,” the Orange Code that defined expected behaviors, and the shift from a product-centered bank to a customer-centered one. He is adept at showing how seemingly separate choices reinforced each other. Customer centricity led to simpler products and better digital experiences. The “Do Your Thing” brand gives an outward expression to ideas the organization had already spent years putting into practice. The progression Hamers presents makes this digital banking transformation story unusually satisfying because readers can watch strategy travel all the way from a CEO’s thinking to technology, organizational structure, office design, employee behavior, and finally the public-facing brand.

Hamers also makes the book feel personal enough to keep the management material from turning into a stack of frameworks. His recurring emphasis on consistency is persuasive because the later chapters show what consistency looks like when the decisions become harder. The discussion of sustainability and ING’s Terra Approach, for example, extends the book’s purpose-driven leadership argument into lending decisions, climate commitments, stakeholder expectations, and the messy reality of societal change. Hamers is willing to discuss adjustments, resistance, imperfect execution, and the tension between empowerment and control, which gives the change management and executive leadership lessons some welcome texture. His voice is confident and occasionally repetitive, especially when returning to purpose, customers, and consistency, but that repetition also mirrors his leadership philosophy: if an idea matters enough to organize a company around, people are going to need to hear it more than once.

The final section brings the ING experience into the age of artificial intelligence, and that turns out to be a natural destination for the book rather than an add-on. Hamers’ most useful contribution is the idea that leaders don’t need perfect foresight so much as a clear direction and an organization capable of moving, learning, and adjusting without losing its purpose. By the end, ING’s transformation feels less like a banking case study than a working example of how strategy becomes real through thousands of linked choices. For executives, transformation leaders, and readers interested in digital strategy, customer experience, agile organizations, corporate purpose, and the future of leadership, there’s a lot here worth carrying into the next big change.

Pages: 318 | ISBN : 978-1544552033