Case study

Chapter 2,Muenjohn, N., et al (2018) Leadership: Regional and Global Perspectives, Cambridge University Press(Page 54) Case Study -Jack Ma - Founder and Executive Chairman, Alibaba Group(See the case below).

Jack Ma - Founder and Executive Chairman, Alibaba Group

Jack Ma is the co-founder and executive chairman of China's enormously successful business-to-business web-based company, Alibaba. Considered both charismatic and inspirational, Jack Ma has consistently emphasised a set of core values that have guided his approach to leadership at Alibaba. These values include teamwork, passion, commitment and integrity, and Jack Ma prides himself on championing these values in everything he does. Teamwork is particularly important to Jack Ma. He attributes the success of his organisation to the cooperative spirit that the company has carefully nurtured and developed from its beginnings. He believes that teamwork enables ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

Heralded by some business commentators as China's answer to Steve Jobs, Jack Ma was born in Zhejiang Province, China in 1964. He had a deep interest in English language from an early age and took every opportunity to practise his spoken English with international business representatives. For nine years, he acted as an informal tour guide for English-speaking guests at a hotel close to his home, so that he could engage executives in conversation and improve his own vocabulary and pronunciation. In 1988, Jack Ma graduated with a BA in English from Hangzhou Teacher's College, and went on to lecture in English and International Trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University (Liu & Avery, 2009).

During a visit to the United States in 1995, where he acted as interpreter for a Chinese trade delegation, Jack Ma observed the early power and reach of the Internet. When he got a chance to play around on it one evening, he was very surprised to find absolutely no content relating to China. Upon returning home, Jack Ma began creating his own Chinese web pages and quickly started to receive email enquiries from interested individuals. This prompted him in April 1995 to launch China's first Internet company, China Yellow Pages, which developed professional web sites for businesses. Within the first three years, his company had generated an income stream of just under US$1 million (Rose, 2015).

In 1998, Jack Ma became the director of an IT company established by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. In 1999, he resigned from that position to start his own business-to-business web-based company, and Alibaba was created. Despite the enormous difficulties the firm encountered in its early years, the company survived by attracting more than US$25 million in venture capital investment (Liu & Avery, 2009). This early growth period was nevertheless a painful time for Jack Ma, who struggled with challenges such as the need to make substantial layoffs (Alibaba News, 2009).

By 2003, Alibaba's fortunes had begun to reverse. The outbreak of SARS greatly restricted domestic commercial travel within China, but significantly boosted the demand for e-commerce transactions, lifting Alibaba's business traffic considerably (Davidson, 2009). The company's growing profits enabled Jack Ma to invest some of the capital in launching China's equivalent to eBay: an online auction business, Taobao, which targeted ordinary consumers. This was paired with a newly developed online payment platform called Alipay, offering similar services to PayPal (Rusli, 2011).

In 2005, Jack Ma bought out Yahoo! China, which brought in more than US$1 billion in investment for Alibaba. In the same year, Fortunenominated him as one of the 25 most powerful businesspeople in Asia. Just three years later, Jack Ma's unique leadership style had captured the attention of international business analysts. In 2008, he was nominated by Barron's Investment Magazineas one of the world's 30 best CEOs, winning widespread recognition for his energetic and enthusiastic leadership. In 2009, Time Magazinenominated Jack Ma as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, paying tribute to his visionary leadership (Ignatius, 2009). In a candid interview, Jack Ma explained his three-pronged growth strategy for Alibaba: 'Win eBay, buy Yahoo, and stop Google' (Gallardo, 2015). In 2010, Google pulled out of China, leaving behind an online market that was more than twice the size of their US customer base (Waddell, 2016). This move meant that Jack Ma had achieved all three of his key strategic intentions.

Jack Ma has an overriding sense of mission to change the way business is conducted in China and to restore his country's sense of pride and culture. He sees Chinese businesses as being responsible for setting a vision for improving the lives of all employees as well as the greater community (Gallardo, 2015). Alibaba employees see him as highly approachable and easy to relate to. When he visits his employees in their offices, he likes to joke and lighten the mood for them, often handing out spray-cans of silly string. Although he is both tenacious and persistent, for Jack Ma work should not be all-consuming, as he has said on several occasions:

We are born here not to work but to enjoy life. We are here to make things better for one another ... if you are spending your whole life working, you will certainly regret it (Kux, 2016).

Jack Ma considers authentic leadership one of the most crucial aspects of successful organisations today. It is not about uniting an organisation under the vision of a single person but about uniting people in service to a common goal; the vision is far more important than the leader.

Jack Ma's broader vision is for China to become a leader in the e-commerce world (Popovic, 2014). In September 2014, Alibaba raised more than US$25 billion in an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, making it one of the most valuable Internet companies globally (China National News, 2014). Jack Ma currently serves as Executive Chairman of the Alibaba Group, having stepped down from the role of CEO in 2013.

Alibaba is a holding company with 10 major subsidiaries including Alibaba.com, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Taobao.com, Tmall.com, Juhuasuan.com, 1688.com, AliExpress, Ant Financial Services (which includes Alipay), Cainiao Logistics Network and Alimama, a marketing technology platform. The holding company is governed by a 30-member steering committee consisting of managers from the Alibaba Group. Jack Ma explains that this structure enables the team of executives to collaborate better and to avoid the pitfalls of bureaucracy. He says it permits the businesses to focus on long-term growth, rather than getting caught up in short-term shareholder interests. Nine of the 30 governing members are women. Alibaba Group thus has a better gender balance in its corporate leadership team than either Google or Twitter (McGregor, 2014).

Questions (Include academic references in your answers)

1. What might explain the relatively high proportion of female executives on the Alibaba Group's steering committee? What advantages might this give the organisation?
2. Is Jack Ma a positive role model for leaders today? Give reasons to support your answer.