"She can investigate anyone in the company, including myself," ma made in 2016 when he handed over the "Ali Integrity and Compliance Department" to Jiang Fang.
Since the establishment of Alibaba in 1999, the company has made great strides, from 18 people in the early days of entrepreneurship to more than 250,000 people today, and the scale of the company is as high as more than 400 billion.
However, "the forest is big and everyone has it", along with the rise of the business empire, the difficulty of management has also intensified, and corruption incidents have appeared repeatedly.
Growing up history of rural girls
Born in a rural family in Mianyang, Sichuan Province, Jiang Fang was smart and studious since she was a child, and in 1992, with excellent results, she was admitted to Hangzhou Institute of Electronics Industry.
At that time, there were still relatively few college students, Jiang Fang's admission to college was like a golden phoenix flying out of the chicken nest, the family was overjoyed, and her father took out all his savings to tell her that even if he smashed pots and sold iron, he also wanted to send her to study.
With the support of her family, Jiang Fang sat alone on the green-skinned train to Hangzhou with excitement and yearning. When she first arrived at school, she was not familiar with life, and she hovered between the library and the classroom every day, and all her energy was used to study.
At that time, they had a course called "Intensive Reading of English Works", and the teacher was the future Internet tycoon - "Jack Ma".
Jiang Fang, who grew up in the countryside, has always been at the bottom of the class, and every time she sees Ma Yun talking on the podium in fluent and beautiful English, she can't help but envy in her heart, so after class, she often looks for Ma Yun to open a small stove, and also takes the initiative to participate in the West Lake English corner created by Ma Yun.
Through this course, Jiang Fang and Ma Yun gradually formed a deep mentor-apprentice friendship, they often exchanged work and study with each other, even if Ma Yun later resigned and left the school, the two still maintained close contact.
In June 1995, Jiang Fang was about to graduate, and according to her parents' wishes, she had decided to return to her hometown to work, but her heart was nostalgic for Hangzhou, where she had lived for four years.
Just then, a farewell phone call disrupted all of her plans, eventually setting her on a bumpy and glorious path.
At that time, Ma Yun had just started his second venture, and the Chinese Yellow Pages he created with his wife Zhang Ying and his friend He Yibing had been launched to make homepages for enterprises, but because of insufficient funds, the company had only three people.
A few days before leaving Hangzhou, Jiang Fang called Ma Yun to say goodbye, and in the chat, Ma Yun said bitterly that the company was facing the dilemma of insufficient manpower.
Jiang Fang heard the teacher's words and suddenly thought of herself, if you follow the teacher to start a business, then you can not only help solve the company's problems, but also naturally stay in Hangzhou.
She then introduced herself to Ma Yun, saying that she hoped to join the company and did not care about salary and working environment. Ma Yun couldn't ask for it, the two hit it off, and Jiang Fang officially joined Ma Yun's entrepreneurial team.
When she first arrived at the company, she did not know anything about computers, in order to show her value to help the company tide over the difficulties, personnel, administration, front desk and other work she learned from scratch, all of which she undertook, and even when other colleagues were busy, she was also responsible for cooking and cleaning for everyone.
In March 1996, Hangzhou Telecom Group took a fancy to the prospects of Ma Yun's products and tried to compete with it in the market, and In order not to be suppressed, Ma Yun decided to merge with Hangzhou Telecom and split the shares in a 3:7 ratio.
However, after the merger, Ma Yun's team lost its right to speak, and its development was limited everywhere, resulting in members complaining.
In 1997, Ma Yun decided to abandon the China Yellow Pages, he sold all the shares in his hand to Hangzhou Telecom at a price of three cents per share, and led the team to start a new business with more than 100,000 yuan in exchange, at this time Jiang Fang still chose to follow in his footsteps.
In 1999, 18 members of Ma Yun's team took out all their savings and pooled a total of more than 500,000 yuan to register Alibaba, and Jiang Fang became one of the founders of the future business empire.
In the early days of the company's establishment, funds were needed everywhere, and more than 500,000 yuan were soon stretched, and Jiang Fang, who was in charge of managing finances at that time, woke up first thing every day to calculate accounts, trying to seize every opportunity to save costs.
To this end, she once again took out the spirit of desperate three women, one person and several jobs, not only to do reports, whole materials, contact customers, but also to take over a part of the customer service work, sometimes at the end of the day she has to work nearly 20 hours, sleep at two or three o'clock at night is the norm.
This situation continued until January 2000, with the continuous efforts of everyone, the company successively received Goldman Sachs 5 million US dollars and SoftBank 20 million US dollars investment, after which Alibaba ushered in a golden period of rapid development, Jiang Fang's identity and value also rose.
In 2003, Jiang Fang was appointed assistant general manager, handling the company's affairs as a confidant of Jack Ma, and was soon promoted to deputy chief product officer of Alibaba.
In 2007, Alibaba was listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and its market value exceeded $230 billion on its first day, and Jiang Fang also became a billion-dollar female billionaire.
In the following years, Jiang Fang worked diligently for the group, and became the mainstay of Alibaba with her tenacious character and hard-working spirit, and was deeply trusted by Ma Yun and her colleagues, and the company's employees affectionately called her "sister".
The iron face is selfless, and the storm is provided for in the purge
If an enterprise wants to go long, the most important thing is to have a conscience and a bottom line, which is the belief that Jiang Fang has always adhered to, and it is also the corporate culture that Alibaba has continuously instilled in its employees since its inception.
In the second year of Alibaba's founding, the global Internet company encountered an economic bubble, and the company struggled.
On the one hand, customers do not understand and distrust the emerging online sales model, no one is willing to place orders, and on the other hand, investors continue to exert pressure, and the funds are consumed too quickly, so that all founders are under great pressure and restless every day.
At this time, a company agreed to the previous cooperation invitation, everyone at Alibaba is very excited, if this order is reached, it will not only temporarily appease investors, but also greatly increase the company's influence, and increase a lot of chips for customers later.
In order to make the other party feel sincere, Ma Yun personally went to negotiate with it, but what he did not expect was that a sentence from the person in charge of the other party when signing the contract made Ma Yun turn his face on the spot, directly abandon the huge order, and leave the scene with the employees.
Originally, the person in charge of Party A wanted to fish for oil and water in the cooperation, so he asked Ma Yun for a kickback, which was a common phenomenon in business cooperation, and in the eyes of many people, Alibaba was a critical period of life and death, and it was understandable to use insignificant kickbacks to save the company.
But Ma Yun firmly disagreed, he believes that if this time compromises, there will be countless compromises in the future, and the company will be destroyed sooner or later.
After this incident, Jiang Fang has a deeper recognition of the clean and healthy corporate culture, she once said that "any enterprise will encounter bottlenecks, if one day we no longer have dazzling products and high-end services, then the only thing that can help us conquer customers is to adhere to the bottom line and never compromise the spirit." ”
In her daily work, Jiang Fang has always adhered to her own principles and deeply resented the acts of accepting bribes and corruption.
At the end of 2010, Jiang Fang, who has been focusing on exploring foreign markets, returned to China to take over the work of the Integrity Development System Department.
Soon after taking office, she discovered that since 2009, many foreign customers have publicly commented that Chinese suppliers on Alibaba's B2B platform have been fraudulent, harming their interests, and it has intensified, which has caused heated discussions on the Internet and seriously affected the image of the group.
After asking Ma Yun for instructions, Jiang Fang quickly set up an investigation team to conduct an inventory of the China Supply Department, which is the ace department of Alibaba Group, and the sales staff in it are all elite.
One month's performance can match the performance of other departments in a year, with a daily turnover of tens of billions of yuan, so they also have a resounding title outside - "China Supply Iron Army".
If you want to move the supply department, it is bound to cause huge fluctuations in the enterprise, but Jiang Fang is not afraid, she led the investigation team to sort out more than 2,000 complaint reports, and found that most of the cases involved have the same place.
Some fraudsters deliberately set up shops on the platform, set the product price and minimum purchase volume very low, and chose an unsafe trading method, and then after the foreign buyers paid the deposit, these suppliers suddenly disappeared without a trace, resulting in the buyer's money and goods.
So why did the fraudsters who were rarely seen on the platform suddenly appear?
After talking with the head of the China Supply Department, it was learned that Chinese suppliers needed 50,000 yuan to enter the Alibaba platform, and at the end of 2008, Alibaba launched a low-cost version of the online export service product - "Export Pass", which only cost less than 20,000 yuan.
Suddenly, many unknown suppliers poured in. Under the temptation of high commissions, the salesmen of the Central Supply Department relaxed the audit of Chinese suppliers, and some even deliberately colluded with suppliers to earn commissions on both sides.
After hearing this answer, Jiang Fang was full of anger, and at the meeting, she asked her employees to check the customer information of all the sales staff of the China Supply Department in the past two years, and resolutely could not let go of a black sheep that harmed the interests of customers and smeared the image of the group.
After more than half a month of efforts, Jiang Fang submitted a thick pile of inventory materials to Ma Yun, and seeing that hundreds of platform shops and nearly 100 company employees were involved, Ma Yun was furious and immediately ordered the person in charge of the platform to close all the accounts in the list, dismiss the employees who were directly responsible, and transfer the relevant evidence to the judicial department for investigation and processing.
However, this treatment is clearly not enough for the public to be indignant, and the news is still full of one-sided accusations and protests.
In order to solve the problem, the company held a high-level meeting, at which Jiang Fang excitedly said to Ma Yun: "Why didn't the platform CEO come out and take responsibility?" In this situation, if you don't give a satisfactory response, the company you have worked so hard to create will be finished! ”
Other founders followed suit.
Finally, under the arguments of everyone, Ma Yun was forced to give up the successor he had always been optimistic about, Wei Zhe. On February 21, 2011, Alibaba issued an announcement that CEO Wei Zhe and COO Li Xuhui resigned.
In this incident, Jiang Fangtie's vigorous behavior won the employees of the group, and she won the reputation of "Iron Lady". In the same year, Alibaba officially established the Integrity Department, and Jiang Fang became the head of the department.
Just don't be righteous, sweep away internal corruption
In 2010, the emergence of meituan set off a wave of group buying in China, and Alibaba followed suit, launching "Juhuasuan" to compete with the market.
At the beginning, Juhuasuan was only a second-level domain name of Taobao website, but under the leadership of Yan Limin, Juhuasuan harvested tens of millions of consumers and reached a transaction volume of tens of billions of yuan in just one year, which successfully attracted the attention of the group's senior management.
In October 2011, Juhuasuan spun off from Taobao as an independent business operation, with Yan Limin as the first general manager.
However, not long after taking office, Yan Limin broke into a catastrophe, and excessive praise made him lose himself, only focusing on expanding his business, but ignoring team management and system building.
Since the second half of 2011, there have been reports from platform merchants that Juhuasuan's staff accepted bribes, disrupted order, and arranged traffic and business space for bribed merchants in the process of attracting businesses during the shopping festival.
After Jiang Fang received the wind, she immediately joined forces with the compliance department to conduct a thorough investigation of Juhuasuan, and soon they found that a local shop called "Love Marriage" participated in group buying activities more than 100 times in half a year, and according to the activities of Juhuasuan, a store can only participate twice a month, and it is obvious that there must be someone behind this store.
Immediately after that, they inquired about the qualifications of this store and found that the registration time of "Love Marriage" was less than one year, and the praise rate and score were not passed, which did not meet the requirements of the store participating in the group purchase activity.
Then Jiang Fang ordered someone to secretly investigate the actual owner of the store, and finally found out the truth of the matter, it turned out that the store was jointly funded by three employees in the company, and one of the employees was Juhuasuan's second child, who knew that he did not comply with the law, illegally recommended his own store to participate in the activity and turned away the merchants who met the requirements.
Jiang Fang was indignant about this, and intensified the investigation of Juhuasuan, under her leadership, a group of people followed the vine to touch the melon, and successively pulled out more than 20 company moths.
Some of them are corrupt and bribe-taking, embezzling and accepting bribes by using the discretionary rights of "small two" merchants, accepting millions of gifts at every turn, and some falsely reporting merchant information, resulting in counterfeit and shoddy products entering the platform, and these people have many executives in the company, including Yan Limin himself.
In 2011, after Yan Limin's promotion, the spring breeze was triumphant, and he used the power in his hands to open the back door for his good friend Wan Several times, allowing his company's products to participate in juhuasuan activities, and Wan bought two cars to give to Yan Limin in order to thank him for his help, worth millions of yuan.
At that time, Alibaba's various businesses were thriving, and a large number of small second-hand players held huge powers in order to kill chickens and scare monkeys and eliminate corruption within the group.
Jiang Fang acted violently and directly demanded that more than 20 employees, including Yan Limin, be dismissed, and at the same time, she also handed over all the evidence and list in her hands to the police.
In July 2012, after a court judgment, Yan Limin was sentenced to 7 years in prison for accepting bribes from non-state workers, Chai Sen, Kong Beichuang, Lin Xiandou and others were sentenced to 5 years in prison for illegally accepting bribes for personal gain and providing others with a good chance to get together, and more than 20 employees were sentenced to high fines, paying the price for their mistakes.
After this battle, Jiang Fang became famous and was known as the "queen of anti-corruption" by industry insiders, and under her impetus, Alibaba implemented a series of business codes of conduct, making detailed provisions on financial interests, customer exchanges, and matters related to receiving gifts and payments, and the company began to implement a rotation system, changing management regularly to avoid corruption caused by the concentration of power.
On May 22, 2014, Jiang Fang exposed and reported that Wang Kai, vice president of Alibaba Group's human resources department, had accepted 2.6 million yuan in benefits and sent him to prison, and Wang Kai was sentenced to eight years in prison.
In February 2016, Youku Tudou had just been acquired by Ali, and Jiang Fang participated in the investigation of the company's finances, found that vice president Lu Fanxi's financial situation was different, and then she reported to the police and arrested him.
In November, Jiang Fang found out that Kong Qi, vice president of Alibaba Pictures, had embezzled and accepted bribes of more than 1.9 million yuan, after which Kong Qi was taken away by the police for investigation.
In December 2018, Yang Weidong, president of Alibaba Entertainment Youku and CEO of Ali Music, was pulled down by Jiang Fang and fined 2 million yuan for embezzlement and bribery, and sentenced to 7 years in prison.
In the past seven years, 7 senior executives of Ali Group have fallen, jiang fang has been called Ali's "knife guard" by many people, it is precisely because she insists on defending the bottom line of the enterprise, Alibaba can always stand in a leading position in the industry, in 2016, Ali integrity and compliance department was established, Ma Yun personally handed over this burden to Jiang Fang.
Alibaba Group can be said to be one of the few "women can hold up half the sky" enterprise in China, six of the 18 founders are women, and most of them still hold key positions in the group, equal pay for equal work has always been a common expectation of women, and in the future, I hope that there will be more excellent women like Jiang Fang standing at the top of the pyramid.