Is Alibaba equivalent to Proctor & Gamble? If so, what is the vision of Jack Ma? I'm still not sure how one articulates a vision for such a conglomerate.
So when you're the CEO of this group do you tell your board "I'd like to own everything that falls under consumer-facing e-commerce"? I am thinking in cases like this the vision is to plain make as much money as possible. Everything else is just a mechanism to achieve that. This is no different than running a hedge-fund group where you make money off of your portfolio.
With the relationship souring, Mr. Ma transferred ownership of Alibaba’s fast-growing online payment service, Alipay, to an entity that he controlled. He didn’t get the permission of Alibaba’s board. He just went ahead and did it.
This is one thing I love about Asia, when it comes to business. (There are many things not to love, but I'll avoid those for now.) People act instead of playing the emasculating permission-seeking games you see around here.
In North America-- and it's worst in the supposedly "entrepreneurial" VC-funded ecosystem-- business people have this effete need to manicure their reputations, which means they'll never go all-in on one strategy or business. The "This is right, I'm fucking doing it" impulse is not something you see in the U.S. where "failure" means "$350k/year EIR gig" [0]. In that situation, people are more inclined to play nice and let themselves lose.
[0] There are, of course, plenty of actually poor people in the U.S. for whom failure means something worse than $350k/year EIR gig-- in fact, that's probably 99.5% of Americans-- but the U.S. class system is pretty smooth-running at this point and keeps those actually poor people away from decisions that matter. For people who actually get to make business decisions in the U.S., failure has no real consequences. Conversely, if there's any chance that you might have a real stake in winning or something to lose in failure, the U.S. class system is pretty good at making sure you don't get any real power.
On the other hand, if you grew up in a place where failure has actual painful consequences (beyond mild embarrassment) you're more likely to play to win, rather than asking "How will this affect my reputation and my buddies?" and settle for a draw.
In the U.S., people play permission-seeking games because their goals aren't to win in business, but to get on the boards of prestigious non-profits and get their children into prep schools (which means that "just fucking do it" business moves are too risky; you might compete too hard against someone on the board of something important, like the museum where the deans of various prep schools are also on the board). In Asia, they play to win (like Ma) because they're only a generation or two removed from having no other choice.
I tend to have more respect for people who act swiftly out of a sense of self-preservation than I do for U.S.-style social climbers who decline to act boldly because they're afraid it'll keep their kids out of MBA school.
Acting unilaterally when your decisions affect others deserves no praise. It's the kind of egocentric dick-waving we saw in the US in the 90s (again in the 2.0 bubble), and plenty of companies crashed and burned because of it. We need fewer glorious cult-leaders in business, not more.
In China you can get away with transferring other peoples assets to yourself without asking, if you're powerful. In the US they'd sue your ass. In Singapore you couldn't get away with it either I'd imagine. I bet you wouldn't love it if you had a business in China and some local grabbed it.
