The Tao of Alibaba by Brian A Wong

Author:Brian A Wong [A., Brian Wong]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Head: The Brains of the Operation

Heart power is the passion and spirit that inspires team members and partners to march forward and make it through even the most difficult of times. But such energy needs guidance, and that direction comes from the head. Head power is the rational thinking, logic, theory, methodologies, frameworks, critical analysis, and professionalism needed to identify the real customer value and to deliver it in a way that helps customers solve their problems and advance the company’s mission.

An organization’s head power in the modern digital era is more important than ever before because of unrelenting competitive forces. In some respects, it has never been easier to launch a start-up, with abundant funding opportunities, but navigating a path toward profitability has never been more arduous because of the intense competition. With so many ambitious entrepreneurs willing to do anything to gain even a slight edge, the markets have become minefields.

Though Alibaba had to overcome many difficult periods, it also had the advantage of championing what were then novel solutions to real consumer needs. We were swimming in a “blue ocean,” so to speak, where the challenge was explaining what we did and persuading potential customers that it was valuable, not fending off competitors. Today’s booming digital economy is a “red ocean,” filled with powerful competitors and innovators. In this environment, the ability to assess your company’s strengths and plot the proper strategic choices can make the difference between surviving or bowing out early.

With DingTalk, Alibaba’s workplace messaging app, cofounder Wu Zhao was able to apply logic and strategic thinking to turn the company’s previously unsuccessful consumer instant messaging service, Laiwang, into a tool that revolutionized the business productivity space in China. Wu observed that many Chinese companies, regardless of their size, lacked a cheap, effective, and easily accessible solution for team-based communication. Large corporations usually had their own intranet system for sharing files and documents, but the servers were frequently difficult to navigate on mobile devices and required cumbersome network log-ins to perform even basic tasks.

Small and medium-sized businesses rarely had the budget to establish a proprietary corporate server, while consumer messaging apps like WeChat lacked the file management capabilities businesses need. The solution Wu and his team came up with was to leverage Alibaba’s knowledge from years of experience as a business marketplace, a deep understanding of the usual pain points around communication and productivity, to build an all-in-one app to manage all those needs efficiently. It became a top choice for businesses and is now the most widely used enterprise messaging software in China.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, DingTalk’s enhanced functions made it far easier for many businesses to transition to remote work, as well as schools, earning it a recommendation from UNESCO as one of its preferred distance-learning apps. It also became the tool of choice for medical organizations from more than forty-five countries for sharing COVID prevention and treatment information, involving eleven languages. Wu and his team’s analysis and reasoning made DingTalk not only a useful product but an essential one.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.