CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
I finished reading Porter Erisman’s “Alibaba’s World” in a day which is sort of a personal record as I have never finished a business yarn in so short a time. Most business books can get boring after a while but for me, Alibaba’s World is an absolute delight and it has me so engrossed that the 236 pages quickly came to an end. The book is written in an easy-to-read engaging style.
Alibaba’s World by Porter Erisman
At closing time on September 19, 2014 of its IPO, Alibaba’s market value was US$231 billion, making it the largest IPO in history – bigger than Google, Facebook and Twitter combined. Alibaba has the humblest beginning from an apartment in Hangzhou city, China, when Jack Ma was still an English teacher.
Erisman’s narration of how the Chinese schoolteacher, who twice failed his college entrance exams, rose from obscurity to found Alibaba and lead it from struggling startup to the world’s most dominant e-commerce player is a tale that will inspire many to chase their dreams.
Erisman joined Alibaba in its infancy as a Chinese speaking, American-MBA PR guy who helped spearhead its international expansion. Erisman shares stories of weathering the dotcom crash, the close shave with bankruptcy, the David-and-Goliath tussle with eBay and Google, and the near-disaster arising from the misguided advice of foreign experts. I love how Alibaba’s Taobao outmaneuvers Ebay in the battle for dominance of the Chinese online marketplace.
Ma might have been small in stature but he is massive when it comes to ambition and resilience. The story is replete with fascinating moments in Ma’s career, which ultimately became huge turning points in the history of e-commerce. Before he was a businessman, Jack Ma acted as a tour guide for Jerry Yang, the Taiwan-born founder of Yahoo!. Erisman details the story of how Ma and Yang became friends and ultimately joined forces to defeat EBay in China, no small undertaking, given the size and scope of EBay’s worldwide operations.
Another highlight of the book is where the prickly, adversarial Google leaders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, meet Jack Ma, Porter Erisman, and a few other members of Alibaba’s leadership in a conference room in a hotel in a mainland China hotel. The Google guys didn’t even understand what Alibaba’s business model was.
The book also highlights some of Jack Ma’s mistakes, particularly his battle with former Yahoo! China head, Zhou Hongyi, and Zhou’s new venture Qihoo.com. The public volleys between Alibaba and Qihoo grew into an ugly dogfight that made neither party look good.
The book is certainly replete with lessons for any western (or eastern) business leader who wants to get a big company off the ground with limited resources and enormous challenges. Jack Ma, the face of China Inc., is certainly a person budding businessmen can learn some lessons from.
“If you don’t imagine it will happen, it will never happen.” – Jack Ma