I finished the book “Alibaba, The House that Jack Ma Built” by Duncan Clark. I recommend it.
Its hard not to get drawn to Jack’s Cinderella story. Coming from a very humble background, his personality, belief in himself and hard work (along with the kindness of an Australian family he met as a free tour guide to practice his English), was the source of one of the Internet’s and certainly China’s most successful tech companies.
Below are ten leadership principles inspired by Jack Ma:
1. Hire from non-first tier universities – they are hungrier
2. Be passionate and show long term vision (in Alibaba’s case 120 years). His passion won the hearts of investors throughout his journey – from Softbank’s Masayoshi Son to Yahoo’s Gerry Young.
3. If you raise money when you really need it – you’re too late. Alibaba survived the biggest obstacles by raising early, and being frugal at times of uncertainty.
4. Remember who helped you get started. Jack’s loyalty and friendships lasted throughout his story, well after he succeeded.
5. Encourage employees to sell stock gradually to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
6. Obsess about the customer, eventually it will win. Other companies put KPIs ahead of customer satisfaction, which eventually led to their demise. Jack committed to free listings on Alibaba and Taobao, fending off “FeeBay”.
7. Rally the company around their ‘battle scars’ – Alibaba survived several setbacks, Sars attacks on their parcels, an epic battle against eBay – Jack used those to bring the company together and give employees a sense of shared purpose.
8. Stay curious, be an early adopter of new technology. Jack was an early adopter of the Internet in China and started his journey by building websites for Chinese businesses who didn’t even have access to the Internet. He walked around with printouts of mocks to show people what their sites look like.
9. Own the critical parts of your value chain – Jack identified early the importance of payments
10. On Career development (source, not in the book)
“When you are 20 to 30 years old, you should follow a good boss [and] join a good company to learn how to do things properly.
When you are 30 to 40 years old, if you want to do something yourself, just do it. You still can afford to lose, to fail”
Soon thereafter, though, Ma recommended that people start prioritizing stability, family and the future generations.
Instead of diving into a new field or subject toward the later years in your career, he said:
“when you’re 40 to 50 years old, my suggestion is you should do things you are good at.
When you are 50 to 60 years old, spend time training and developing young people, the next generation,” Ma added. “When you are over 60 years old, you better stay with your grandchildren.”
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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