Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built pdfdrive com

Jack’s Mantra
Perhaps the most famous lesson of Jack the teacher is known by heart by every
Alibaba employee: “Customers first, employees second, and shareholders third.”
Jack describes this as Alibaba’s philosophy.
Customers, especially the “shrimp,” come first in his mantra. When asked
by the journalist Charlie Rose if he saw himself as an “apostle for small
business,” Jack agreed, “I’m a strong believer. It’s my religion.” Many small
businesses in China don’t just use Alibaba’s websites as a marketing channel,
they depend entirely on them to make a living. Jack has always insisted on
offering most of Alibaba’s services for free.
Employees may come second to customers for Jack, but an ability to
motivate his team to overcome obstacles has been critical to Alibaba’s success.
Joe Tsai didn’t hesitate in describing them to me as “disciples,” when recalling
his first impression in 1999 of Alibaba’s earliest employees, some of whom had
already followed Jack for years. Jack doesn’t sugar coat the challenges to his
employees. One of his favorite messages to them, and a “bit” in his comedy
routine, is “Today is brutal, tomorrow is more brutal, but the day after tomorrow
is beautiful. However, the majority of people will die tomorrow night.” The goal
for Alibaba to survive for 102 years might seem weird to outsiders but not to his
employees, especially the Aliren (the “Ali People”)—those with more than three
years of service—for whom it is an accepted part of the Alibaba culture.
Shareholders come third in Jack’s ranking because he refuses to be diverted
from his lofty ambitions by short-term pressures to generate profit. In public,
Jack likes to make fun of his shareholders and investors, a means to burnish his
credentials as a maverick with his employees and the general public. When the
share price of Alibaba’s first business, alibaba.com, languished on the stock
market in 2009, Jack cried out at the rock concert–style gathering for the
company’s employees, “Let the Wall Street investors curse us if they wish!” Not
exactly standard behavior for the senior executive of a publicly listed company.
Yet despite the populist rhetoric, Jack has assiduously created opportunities
at regular intervals—on average every four years or so—for employees and
long-term shareholders to turn a profit from the sale of their shares. Investors
who supported Alibaba early on and stuck with the company for years have been
richly rewarded, much less so those public investors who purchased the
company’s shares in their post-IPO peak.

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