Jack Ma

Founder of Alibaba

The Rags-to-Riches Life Story of Alibaba Founder Jack Ma

The famed entrepreneur is now China's second-richest person.

By Business Insider (https://www.inc.com/business-insider/alibaba-jack-
ma-life-story.html)

Jack Ma -- born Ma Yun -- was born on October 15, 1964, in

Hangzhou, located in the southeastern part of China. He has an older
brother and a younger sister. He and his siblings grew up at a time
when communist China was increasingly isolated from the West, and his
family didn't have much money when they were young.

Ma was scrawny and often got into fights with classmates. "I
was never afraid of opponents who were bigger than I," he recalls in
"Alibaba," a book by Liu Shiying and Martha Avery. Still, Ma had hobbies
just like any other kid. He liked collecting crickets and making them
fight, and was able to distinguish the size and type of cricket just by the
sound it made.

After President Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Ma's hometown became a tourist mecca. As a
teenager, Ma started waking up early to visit the city's main hotel, offering visitors tours of the city in
exchange for English lessons. The nickname "Jack" was given to him by a tourist he befriended.

Without money or connections, the only way Ma could get ahead was through education. After
high school, he applied to go to college -- but failed the entrance exam twice. After a great deal of
studying, he finally passed on the third try, going on to attend Hangzhou Teachers Institute. He
graduated in 1988 and started applying to as many jobs as he could.

He received more than a dozen rejections -- including from KFC -- before being hired as an
English teacher. Ma was a natural with his students and loved his job -- though he only made $12 a
month at a local university. At the World Economic Forum in 2016, Jack Ma revealed he has even been
rejected from Harvard -- 10 times!

Ma had no experience with computers or coding, but he was captivated by the internet when he
used it for the first time during a trip to the US in 1995. He had recently started a translation business
and made the trip to help a Chinese firm recover a payment. Ma's first online search was "beer," but he
was surprised to find that no Chinese beers turned up in the results. It was then that he decided to found
an internet company for China.

Though his first two ventures failed, four years later he gathered 17 of his friends in his
apartment and convinced them to invest in his vision for an online marketplace he called "Alibaba." The
site allowed exporters to post product listings that customers could buy directly.

Soon, the service started to attract members from all over the world. By October 1999, the
company had raised $5 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from SoftBank, a Japanese telecom
company that also invests in technology companies. The team remained close-knit and scrappy. "We will
make it because we are young and we never, never give up," Ma said to a gathering of employees.

He has always maintained a sense of fun at Alibaba. When the company first became profitable,
Ma gave each employee a can of Silly String to go wild with. In the early 2000s, when the company
decided to start Taobao, its eBay competitor, he had his team do handstands during breaks to keep their
energy levels up.

In 2005, Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba in exchange for about a 40% stake in the company.
This was huge for Alibaba -- at the time it was trying to beat eBay in China-- and it would eventually be
an enormous win for Yahoo too, netting it $10 billion in Alibaba's IPO alone.

Ma told Bloomberg he knew Alibaba had made it big when another customer offered to pay his
restaurant bill. "I'm your customer of Alibaba group, I made a lot of money and I know you don't make
any money," said the customer. "I'll pay the bill for you."

Ma stepped down from his post as CEO in 2013, staying on as executive chairman. Alibaba went
public September 19 2014. "Today what we got is not money. What we got is the trust from the people,"
Ma told CNBC.

Ma told employees at a press conference that he hopes they use their newfound wealth to
become "a batch of genuinely noble people, a batch of people who are able to help others, and who are
kind and happy."

One of his greatest passions is the environment. Ma developed an interest in environmentalism

when a member of his wife's family became sick with an illness that Ma suspected was caused by
pollution. He sits on the global board of The Nature Conservancy and spoke during a session of the
Clinton Global Initiative in 2015. He's also been instrumental in funding a 27,000-acre nature reserve in
China.

Ma has largely kept his family life out of the spotlight. He married Zhang Ying, a teacher whom
he met at school, after they graduated in the late 1980s. "[He] is not a handsome man, but I fell for him
because he can do a lot of things handsome men cannot do," Zhang has said. They have two children --
a daughter and a son.

The Review of Alibaba’s Operation Management Details That Have Navigated Them to
Success
By Chanttel Tham Jo Ee & Dr. Rashad Yazdanifard (https://globaljournals.org/GJMBR_Volume15/8-The-
Review-of-Alibabas-Operation.pdf )

Alibaba, the most well-known online company in the world founded by Jack Ma has implemented
and improved their management system in many different styles in order to fit different companies in the
world. In Jack Ma’s concept, autocratic management is applied to make employees more responsive due
to the nature of the works in the industries. However, it will limit the freedoms of the employees when it
comes to giving ideas or making decisions. Moreover, Jack Ma has changed his style into conductive style
of management. This has strongly built loyalty as well as motivation within the employees. After a long
period of management experience, the style that most probably used by Jack Ma throughout his career
formanaging Alibaba group is the persuasive style.

Autocratic Management Style

One of the main reasons Alibaba is so successful is because of their implementation of a good
management system. Good management is the key to the success or failure of any company and in the
case of Alibaba, Jack Ma (who is the founder and CEO) had to experiment with a few management styles
before finding the one that fits their company. His willingness to recognize when things are not working
out and to change accordingly highlights the problem most managers and leaders face – inflexibility. Most
managers choose only form of management and then stick with it until it starts to become ineffective,
leading to first, dissatisfaction within the company’s employees and ultimately the downfall of the
company. Being born in China and being a Chinese man, Jack Ma is very familiar with the concept of
autocratic management (Bassett, 1966). An autocratic management style is one where the manager
makes decisions unilaterally, and without much regard for the subordinates (Bassett, 1966). As a result,
decisions will only reflect the opinions and personality of the manager, which in turn can project an image
of a confident, well managed business. On the other hand, strong and competent subordinates may
become irritated because of the limits placed on their decision-making freedom, leading to a higher
turnover rate amongst the company’s best staff, and the organization will in turn suffer from limited
“front line" perspectives on what works and what does not (Benfari, 2013). When Alibaba was first being
launched, Jack was the only man at the helm and had to take an autocratic position. As the only person
who was internet savvy in their small province, he had to first prove to his friends and family that the
internet existed, by showing them a web page on a computer, and then he had to prove to them that his
non-traditional business could work. With no one to help, Jack had to be the executive decision maker for
the company and all matters involving business related to alibaba.com (Bolton, 1984).

Conductive Management Style

However, as the company grew and expanded they started attracting more qualified people who
wanted to work for them, each with new ideas and expertise to offer to the company if the management
just opened their ears. Jack Ma knew he had to change his management style as it was not conducive to
the running of the company. Even though he was still CEO of the group as a whole, he started to share
responsibility with his trusted co directors and managers. He adopted a management style that was more
conductive and allowed people to work with him, not just for him (Gough, 2014). While more
paternalistic in form, this type of management style is also essentially dictatorial. The difference is that,
executive decisions take into account the best interests of the employees and not just purely that of the
business (Hille, (2013). Communication is again generally downward, but feedback to the management is
encouraged to maintain morale. This style can be highly advantageous when it engenders loyalty from
the employees, leading to a lower labor turnover, thanks to the emphasis on social needs (Guilford,
2014). This is a definite improvement from the autocratic management style where lack of worker
motivation is typical because no loyalty is established between the manager and the people who are
managed (Guilford, 2014). However, the conductive management style also shares disadvantages with
the autocratic style, such as employees becoming dependent on the leader. Nevertheless, it is important
to note that Jack Ma recognized when he should start making changes to his management style in order
keep up with the growing needs of the company, and though the changes were not extremely drastic it
still brought the company one step closer to greatness. It is interesting to observe through this example,
the variation of this management style that is exclusive to Asian cultures. This style is grounded in the
example of the Asian family unit and is known as the paternal style. One parts consultative and with an
undercurrent of what is easily confused with autocratic and dictatorial, managers of this style make
decisions that take into account the best interests of the employees in addition to that of the business,
often more so than interests of the individual manager (Hoff, 1981). Communication is downward, as
feedback and questioning of authority are absent for utmost respect to superiors and group harmony are
central characteristics within the culture. This style demands loyalty from the employees, often more than
that required by society’s rules in general (Hsu, 2013). Staff turnover is discouraged and rare. A strong
work ethic is the status quo as East Asians often have the world's highest numbers of hours worked per
week due to a sense akin to family duty, with the manager being the father and staff their obedient
children, all striving for harmony and other related Confucian characteristics (Kwok, & Thomas, 2014).
Most aspects of work, as in daily life, are done with a highly collectivist orientation. It shares
disadvantages with an autocratic style, such as employees becoming dependent on the leader, and
related issues with seniority based systems. That particular bent never left Jack Ma’s style as it is
inherently apparent at the beginning of the formation of alibaba.com, when he was still working with
friends and family to expand his business, and later when he began hiring more workers. At that time, he
was comfortable using this style because everyone involved in the company was someone he knew on a
personal level. 52Global Journal of Management and Business Research Volume XV Issue IV Version I
Year ( ) A 2015 © 2015 Global Journals Inc. (US) The Review of Alibaba’s Operation Management Details
that have Navigated them to Success An Asian Paternalistic style means that the manager makes
decisions from a solid understanding of what is desired and is considered the best by both consumers
and staff. Managers must appear confident, knowing all answers, and they must promote growth with
harmony, often including hiding harmful or sad news is required （Leites, 1985).