After meeting Jack Ma in 1999, Brian Wong became the first American employee of the Chinese e- commerce giant. Wong offers to reveal the "secret sauce" behind the company's breathtaking rise and argues that the company's synthesis of the best of Eastern and Western traditions provides a template not only for companies seeking to do business in China.
Ma's commitment to "expanding opportunities for China's huge number of SMEs" was the animating principle of the company. In markets dominated by large corporations and state-owned enterprises, Ma believed technology could be the great equalizer.
It's difficult and expensive to reach and serve small businesses in well-developed economies. The challenges were worse in China, where few had bank accounts.
The story of how Alibaba overcame these obstacles and built on this B2B platform to create the leading consumer marketplace, first defeating eBay and then Amazon in the Chinese market, is an amazing one.
The real focus of Wong's book is something else.
He wants to show how the company's approach to aligning its mission-driven organizational design to the needs of customers has broader applicability.
A lot of lists and diagrams and references to Taoist philosophy are included. According to Wong, the company leadership model is built on self-knowledge. The company's hard-nosed key performance indicators are balanced by instinct and broader corporate or social values in many of the examples and frameworks included in "The Tao ofAlibaba."
When Wong describes the "dual track" performance evaluations that encompass an assessment of both business results and adherence to company values it can be illuminating. The level of detail in the book can get tiring. By being told that employees' value adherence was initially graded on a scale of 1-5, not much was added.
Last year's book " Working Backwards" extolled the virtues of the very different management philosophy of Amazon, and there are a number of striking parallels between the two books. The results of both companies are remarkable. Both books were written by former employees and were supported by their previous corporate overlords. The books argue that the practices and processes of the companies can be applied by others. Both books leave the reader with an unanswerable question, which is whether the stunning accomplishments of these companies are a function of their articulated management theories or the force of personality of their charismatic leader.
Jack Ma contributes an enigmatic quote or an unexpected directive only some of which seem to have much to do with Wong's detailed strategic and organizational framework. A number of steps have been taken to institutionalize Ma's ethos. Wong was in charge of setting up theAlibaba Global Leadership Academy to teach the next generation of company management in its culture and theAlibaba Global Initiative to train entrepreneurs in emerging markets. According to the book, a majority of the board is nominated by theAlibaba Partnership, a group of 38 company culture carriers whose new members have to get approval of 75% of the existing partners.
Jack Ma was haunted by the decline of once great technology companies after the departure of their founding team. After making a speech that angered Chinese authorities, Ma stepped off the board and the stock of the company plummeted.
Time will tell if the systems and structures he put in place will be enough to keep the culture he established.
Jonathan A. Knee is a professor and senior advisor at Evercore. The platform delusion is his most recent book.
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