Recently, a post by Yuan An (alias), the research and development head of Alibaba’s “Ding Talk,” before his departure has sparked heated discussions online. In the post, which has garnered close to 20,000 views, he wrote nearly ten thousand words discussing Alibaba’s development, existing issues, reasons behind them, and proposed solutions. Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, also responded to the post.
In his post, Yuan An mentioned that Alibaba’s mission is to make business easier worldwide and its vision is to become a good company lasting for 102 years. He was originally inspired to join Alibaba by this mission.
Over the past fifteen years, Yuan An observed significant changes in both external societal opinions and internal employee attitudes within Alibaba. The company seemed to have lost the dream of bringing positive changes to society. “We talk about KPI (Key Performance Indicators), salary, stocks, houses. We treat customers and users as traffic and data. We focus on how to operate data and how to harvest customers.”
Yuan An expressed that since 2017, he gradually began to feel the exhaustion within Alibaba.
He believed that the overall growth of the internet has slowed down, many of Alibaba’s external acquisition businesses have failed, internal innovation is weak, with few independently innovative businesses aside from e-commerce derivatives like Alibaba Cloud and Xianyu. Ding Talk and Quark are among the few successful cases, with missed opportunities in several markets.
Yuan An also summarized the problems Alibaba faces in terms of people, finance, and matters. Regarding talent, the company excessively relies on talents from external industries or companies, new employees lack the “Alibaba flavor,” internal vicious performance competition and incentive systems are ineffective, the cost of employee collaboration has increased, fewer people actually get things done, internal employee ranks are inflated, unclear rewards and punishments, performance evaluations and salaries are directly linked but not disclosed, giving supervisors a large margin of manipulation. Additionally, unclear corporate strategies, contradicting demands, false prosperity brought by operational data, and prevalent bureaucracy are identified issues.
Yuan An suggested Alibaba returns to the slogan of “a group of people with values and meanings doing valuable and meaningful things together.” He recommended restructuring cultural construction, emphasizing customer priority, team collaboration, clear strategy, and passionate dedication, reforming the HR system, management system, clearing out “grass-roots” middle and senior management, standardized ranks, publicly displaying performance promotion, reducing redundant operations, seeking truth in weak operations, among other measures.
After reading the post, Jack Ma replied, “Hello, Yuan An, thank you for the long letter, it’s well-written. Like human growth, Alibaba’s development also entails many inevitable paths and processes. Alibaba is going through changes. Best wishes to you, and I hope you visit often.”
According to reports, apart from Jack Ma, former Alibaba Chairman Tsai Chi…