Alibaba's leadership change reveals Jack Ma's sense of crisis

Alibaba's 2015Q1 financial report released last night showed that the giant had another bumper harvest season. As a result, Alibaba's stock price rose by more than 8% at the opening and finally closed up 7.5% at $86.

In addition to the financial report and stock price, a personnel change has attracted more attention. Alibaba COO Zhang Yong replaced Lu Zhaoxi as the new CEO, and the handover was completed on May 10.

This information seems a bit sudden. On the surface, with such good performance, there seems to be no reason to change the leader. But judging from the handover deadline, Alibaba must have been prepared. I can think of a few key points:

1. In the spring of 2014, Zhang Yong suddenly replaced Lu Zhaoxi and took full charge of Ali Wireless;

2. In the spring of 2015, Yu Yongfu suddenly replaced Lu Zhaoxi and took full charge of AutoNavi and became the head of Alibaba's mobile business group. What is intriguing is that the person who announced this appointment was not the chairman of the board, Jack Ma, or the CEO, Lu Zhaoxi, but the COO, Zhang Yong. If Zhang Yong's job change was not confirmed at that time, it would not be in line with the normal process of a listed company. My intuition tells me that Alibaba will make personnel adjustments, and Xiaoyaozi will be promoted;

3. Jack Ma was not satisfied with the overall performance in 2014 and cancelled the red envelopes for all employees. This was an unusual signal after a brilliant IPO year.

Some people will attribute the changes to internal corporate politics at Alibaba. As early as when Zhang Yong took over wireless, some people said that Jack Ma was dissatisfied with Lu and had a quarrel with him. But in my opinion, even if there is competition, it is definitely not the result of corporate politics. It must have been the result of Jack Ma's considerations for many years.

If you look back at Jack Ma's style, especially before major changes in the macro situation or other critical time windows, you will find that he, like Ren Zhengfei in China, often has a strong sense of crisis when things are going well. It's just that he doesn't talk about the cycle of "spring" and "winter" like Ren Zhengfei does.

In response to the CEO position adjustment, Jack Ma wrote a letter, "This is the era of the young! !" The title and exclamation mark convey a certain expectation. He emphasized that this is a kind of cultural inheritance: the management of the post-60s faded out of the front line, the management of the post-70s stepped into the front, and the post-80s have become the largest force of the company. There are more than 3,000 people born in the 90s in Alibaba, which almost exceeds the total number of many medium-sized Internet companies. With the resignation of Lu Zhaoxi, who was born in the 60s, many veterans of Alibaba, such as Wang Jian and Wang Shuai, will also resign from their current positions and hand over the responsibilities to those born in the 70s or 80s.

You can sense a sense of time in Jack Ma and Alibaba. Over the past few years, Jack Ma has talked about "young people" almost every time he speaks. I did a simple count and it's been more than 100 times. The public should still remember that Jack Ma said he was "old" two years ago.

Lu Zhaoxi was born in 1969, right at the tail end of the Chinese calendar. You may wonder whether Alibaba’s talent gradient setting lacks flexibility, after all, artificial divisions cannot be made based on age.

But in my opinion, this is a fatalistic law of the Internet industry. The time in this industry is more dense than that in other industries, especially traditional manufacturing. In the same year, when people in traditional industries complained about working overtime, they did not see that people in the Internet industry have been burning their youth at an accelerated rate. The word "overtime" has almost become a standard and background. They treat one year as several years. In my circle of friends, almost all of the people who scrolled through the screen late at night and went out to eat were from Alibaba.

In traditional industries, especially manufacturing, we can see entrepreneurs in their 70s or even 80s still in the forefront. For example, Morris Chang, founder of TSMC, a global semiconductor foundry giant, was 77 years old and had gray hair when I interviewed him in November 2008. In mid-2009, he returned to the front line and served as CEO until now. In the Internet industry, young people have more gray hair.

Some time ago, an older friend of mine in the retail industry said that he was a little uncomfortable with the people in Alibaba, as they were all born in the 1980s.

You have to admit that there is indeed an iron and cruel law of time in this industry. Often, it is not your experience or spirit that is aging, but the aging of the characteristics of a group of people in an era. When your experience, cognition, and insight achieve a huge breakthrough, it often means that your ability to act is gradually aging.

It reminds me of a historian's words: If you are not an outstanding poet before the age of 30, don't write poetry after the age of 30. There is a game of imagination, cognition, practice and action. The Internet industry is full of countless imaginations, but practice, action and execution always precede many rational cognitions. Last year, I wrote an article "Why Internet tycoons don't read books", analyzing the speed of knowledge update in this industry, which cannot keep up with the call of dreams and the powerful effects brought by action and practice. When a person starts to write a book, he is already old. Because he summarizes past experiences, and the Internet is always facing the future.

There is no real time boundary between Lu Zhaoxi, who was born in the 1960s, and Zhang Yong, who was born in the 1970s. But when the personnel changes were announced, I would rather believe that this is Jack Ma's uncompromising, undeterred, and uncompromising attitude towards the inheritance of Alibaba's culture and values. Of course, there is also his strong sense of crisis.

Jack Ma designed the talent gradient construction, especially the channel for cultivating young people, very early on, and established it as an institutional form with rigid characteristics.

For example, new employees receive strict training, allowing senior executives or old employees to share their experiences, pass on culture and history, cultivate identity, and shape values. In terms of skills, there is the Luohan Hall training base, which inspires thinking in a situational way, stimulates action and execution; the Xiakexing focuses on the inheritance of management experience, and the Jockey Club focuses on internal project competitions. There are also succession plans that many companies are reluctant to talk about publicly. 12 years ago, Alibaba began to carry out a "successor" training plan for each position, incorporating culture, values ​​and teamwork into employee performance appraisals, and began to implement the work of rejuvenating the leadership group in 2012. As for the partnership system that has attracted great attention, since 2010, 18 Luohans resigned from their "founder" status and launched the partnership system. This is not only a guarantee of Alibaba's culture and values, but also a system design for the company's future decision-making and management.

A company always has a unique temperament. You can see that no matter how pale or graceful they are, many Alibaba people always have a passion like chicken blood. Among the business people I have come into contact with, Alibaba people may be the group that talks about values ​​the most directly. People who are not familiar with them will feel that it is fake at first, but then they will realize that this is the core part of their work. Alibaba, with tens of thousands of people, is famous for its innovation and execution. It is simply unimaginable without this institutional design.

The young age of Internet practitioners determines the design of management, talent, and organizational structure of specific Internet companies. Many Internet companies are aware of this and have made institutional plans early on in order to break the ceiling for young people. For example, some internal entrepreneurship is more about creating upward channels in the form of spreading the cake. This kind of effect is not only not obvious, but also wastes huge resources and leads to a bureaucratic atmosphere in the company. Because what connects them is not cultural ties, what is transmitted is not culture, but opening up a way out for talents through artificial job design. This is like spreading the cake, which will run aground soon.

You should know that the Internet industry has a more centrifugal tendency in culture than other industries. Without a system design, persistent indoctrination, and infiltration into daily work, focusing on the improvement of people and personality, Internet companies will definitely encounter the problem of talent and organizational management earlier than traditional industries. The most embarrassing thing is that it is not that there are few talents, but that you don’t know how to arrange a large group of awesome talents. It will not make much sense to expand the business horizontally and repeatedly to create a way out. Internet companies can only create a channel for young people to rise through the call of culture and vision and the cruel time series. Someone must make a huge sacrifice.

Alibaba's move will certainly attract the attention of more Internet companies, and will also affect other industries and even the entire society. I believe that Ma Huateng, Li Yanhong, and Liu Qiangdong will have similar thoughts. Zhang Ruimin and Wang Jianlin will also have the same thoughts. In the past, the topic of "successor" was once very hot in the mass media, which actually reflected the changes of an era.

Alibaba's move caters to an era of mass innovation. It may lead other companies to follow suit, creating a greater voice and effect for the new generation of young people to step into the forefront of society. This suddenly reminded me of Premier Li Keqiang's visit to Zhongguancun Entrepreneurship Street yesterday, where he emphasized the value of young people. I think Alibaba's personnel adjustment last night was similar. This should be the collective unconscious catering of the government and corporate decision-makers to an era.

However, Jack Ma's praise of the value of young people must have more industry considerations behind it. In my opinion, this is also a signal of Alibaba's sense of crisis and opportunity.

Alibaba is at a critical turning point. The IPO has released a huge effect, and Alibaba's influence has already reached the world. Many leaders of regional countries regard Jack Ma as a guest of honor. You can feel that what is being rendered here is the innovative value of the Internet industry on a global scale.

But this is equivalent to putting a pair of "golden handcuffs" on Alibaba. As one of the global Internet giants, can you take on the mission given by the times? This requires not only Jack Ma's feelings, but also Alibaba's innovation in micro-economic life. Before and after the IPO, Jack Ma emphasized social responsibility more frequently than before. He knows that the effects of Alibaba's every move are no longer the same as they were a few years ago.

After 16 years of development, Alibaba has established its position, but in 2015, Alibaba must give the outside world new confidence that it still has huge room for growth and huge innovation capabilities. This not only affects the stock price of Alibaba listed companies, but also the future fate of Alibaba Group.

Stanford University professor Shai Bernstein once tracked nearly 2,000 listed technology companies and finally came up with this number: a company's innovation ability will drop by 40% after going public.

In the past few months, Alibaba has experienced many storms, especially the judgments from various regulatory departments and even the public. In my opinion, this is a reflection of the innovation dilemma faced by Alibaba at the micro-business level. When its platform transaction volume reaches a trillion scale, it is enough to affect the regional economy and even influence the fate of the industrial structure of a place. Alibaba's ecology is very powerful, but Alibaba's soil is still based on the growth driven by the increase in the number of platform merchants. If it cannot develop a deeper service-driven model, it will definitely encounter the ceiling earlier than other peers.

Jack Ma has indirectly mentioned this issue during the IPO, last year's Double 11 and Double 12. He constantly exaggerates the transformation from IT to DT, and constantly emphasizes the vision of various smart industries in the era of big data. You can see that Alibaba's rapid layout in internationalization, verticalization, wireless, rural e-commerce, infrastructure output, etc., are all reflections of this issue.

Ma Yun's latest speech at the Beijing staff conference is actually a key signal. By doubling the number of people served, Ma Yun is conveying that Alibaba must have a broader international perspective; emphasizing the seven major business sectors, especially the Internet business in Beijing, is a signal that Alibaba is deepening its roots in China and accelerating its embrace of the real economy.

All of this will create new requirements for management and talent: first, an international perspective; second, faster and stronger learning ability, mastering more new skills and management tools; third, going offline and strengthening the spirit of implementation; fourth, a cultural spirit that is integrated into the entire society.

This demand actually caters to the era of young people. Without breaking the talent ceiling, Alibaba's restart strategy is unlikely to be realized. The opening of Alibaba's new round of growth space will also be delayed.

The change of leadership on May 7, 2015, when Jack Ma, born in the 1970s, replaced Lu Zhaoxi, born in the 1960s, and stepped to the forefront, was not based on a clear time boundary, but it must have been due to Jack Ma and Alibaba's deep sense of crisis. I realized from this that Alibaba is plunging into reality while placing itself on an international stage. This is not only Alibaba's transformation, but also a new step for China's Internet industry to open up its horizons and move towards maturity. It is also a micro-indication of the second largest economy's integrated economic model leveraging the world.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.