Author丨Pastoral
Editor丨Nuts
封面来源丨Unsplash
Half a year after leaving Ali, Daniel Zhang's former policies are being completely reversed.
In a recent interview with the media, Joe Tsai, the current chairman of Alibaba's board of directors, said, "When we look inside and reflect on what has happened in the past few years, we find ourselves falling behind because we have forgotten who our real customers are. We don't have the best experience for users who shop with our app. ”
Although Daniel Zhang was not directly named in the words, it is not difficult to see that Tsai Chongxin was not satisfied with Ali in Daniel Zhang's era.
Tsai Chongxin and Daniel Zhang are both CFOs, and according to the order of succession, Daniel Zhang is also Tsai Chongxin's predecessor. But within Ali, Cai Chongxin is obviously older and has a higher prestige, and his statement seems to be able to represent the current trend within Ali.
Tsai Chongxin also said in the interview that Ali's morale has been low in the past three years, but if it can clearly communicate to employees what the direction is, then they will still be rejuvenated.
On April 10, Ma Yun published a thousand-word post within Alibaba, saying "Thank you Joe (Tsai Chongxin) for her courage and responsibility", and also said: "It's not terrible to make mistakes, no one doesn't make mistakes, what is really terrible is not knowing mistakes, not admitting mistakes, and not correcting mistakes." ”
After Wu Yongming became the new CEO of Alibaba, he returned to the main business of e-commerce and focused on improving user experience. Correspondingly, a number of old policies planned by Daniel Zhang before have also been terminated.
1
Tsai Chongxin and Ma Yun spoke out one after another
The core themes of Tsai Chongxin and Ma Yun's successive speeches revolve around two major directions, one is to admit that Ali has indeed made mistakes in direction in the past few years, and the second is to continue to encourage employees to awaken Ali's current low morale.
Half a year after Daniel Zhang stepped down, Ali's trough in the past few years was finally openly discussed internally, and it was also the tone set by the two souls of Jack Ma and Tsai Chongxin, looking at the domestic Internet industry, this is also a relatively profound case of self-reflection.
In addition to the business decline, both Tsai Chongxin and Ma Yun invariably mentioned Alibaba's internal management problems, which Tsai Chongxin blamed on the diseases of large companies and human nature, while Ma Yun believed that Ali should return from an organization with slow decision-making to efficiency and market first.
If Ali's loss of market competition in the past few years can be partly due to the drastic changes in the external environment, but for its own inefficiency in organizational management, it directly aimed at senior managers represented by Daniel Zhang.
In September last year, Daniel Zhang announced his resignation as chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud, bidding farewell to Ali in a way that was almost "naked retirement", taking only the honorary title of "meritorious Ali person" and $1 billion in technology fund investment.
In Tsai Chongxin's internal letter to "farewell" to Daniel Zhang, he mainly affirmed Daniel Zhang's major achievements in Alibaba in the past ten years, including creating the Double 11 shopping festival, leading Tmall's rapid development, realizing Alibaba's wireless transformation, and helping Alibaba successfully enter the world.
However, during the four years that Daniel Zhang served as chairman of Alibaba's board of directors, the evaluation given to him was only "leading Ali to stabilize the market and tide over one difficulty after another." ”
Admittedly, failing to continue to forge a new dynastic myth after taking full charge of Ali, Daniel Zhang's performance clearly did not meet the expectations of Jack Ma and Tsai Chongxin.
Especially in the past few years, Pinduoduo has allowed its rapid rise, and even completed the overtaking of Ali in terms of market value, and the e-commerce business has almost shown a trend of confrontation.
Within Alibaba, in recent years, both online reviews and employee morale have declined significantly, and "Ali's black talk" has even become a famous meme of Internet companies for a time, and the shrinkage of the company's stock price and the decline of business have made employees have a huge sense of frustration in both income and achievement.
In this case, Daniel Zhang's "dismissal" has become inevitable.
2
Ali erased Daniel Zhang's mark
If Daniel Zhang's resignation from all positions in Ali last year marked the end of his personal Ali era, then the internal reform of Ali in the past six months has completely erased most of Daniel Zhang's imprint on Ali.
First of all, in terms of organizational structure, after Wu Yongming took over as CEO of Alibaba, he vigorously promoted the youthfulness of the leadership team, and a large number of post-85 Ali Mesozoic generations began to hold the top position.
In December last year, Wu Yongming's first fire after serving as the CEO of Taotian Group burned to the management team, and he promoted 6 young managers to lead the key businesses of Taotian Group in one go, and reported directly to Wu Yongming.
Within Taotian Group, Wu Yongming even put forward a request to "face up to the status quo and start a new business".
At the same time, many Ali old people who had experienced the era of Ma Yun and Daniel Zhang also took the initiative to hand over the scepter in their hands.
In March this year, Yu Yongfu, who has been with Alibaba for ten years, stepped down from the management positions of Ele.me and AutoNavi, and transformed into an investor to continue to support Alibaba. Soon after, Hou Yi, who single-handedly created Hema Xiansheng, also announced his retirement and stepped down as the CEO of Hema and will provide guidance to the company as the chief honorary advisor of Hema in the future.
Under the intensive adjustment of personnel, the spin-off and listing plan promoted by Daniel Zhang at the end of his tenure as CEO was also completely scrapped.
In March last year, Daniel Zhang issued an internal letter announcing that Alibaba would start building a "1+6+N" organizational structure, implement the CEO responsibility system under the leadership of the board of directors of each business group and business company, and take overall responsibility for their own business results.
The most eye-catching aspect of this major reform is that in the future, Alibaba's qualified business groups and companies will have the possibility of independent financing and listing.
After this reform plan was released, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, led by Daniel Zhang, took the lead in announcing the launch of spin-off and listing, and will introduce external strategic investors.
Daniel Zhang believes that listing is not only the listing itself, but also a higher requirement to face the market independently.
Daniel Zhang hopes that Ali will be able to produce a number of listed companies in the future, and several listed companies will be able to have children and more listed companies after a few years. In this way, Alibaba's business can be considered to prosper, and the problem of "who to fight for" for generations of employees can be solved.
But only a year later, the spin-off and listing plans of Alibaba's various business groups were halted one after another. In November last year, Ali said in the release of its quarterly financial report that it would no longer promote the complete spin-off of the cloud intelligence group in view of various uncertainties. At the same time, Freshippo's IPO plans have also been suspended.
In March this year, Ali announced that in order to better strengthen the collaboration with Ali's e-commerce business and continue to support Cainiao to expand its investment in global logistics network, it decided to withdraw Cainiao's listing application.
3
Ali desperately needs to regain his morale
From a business perspective, Tsai Chongxin and Ma Yun's recent voices are more about correcting deviations than criticizing the era of Ali Daniel Zhang.
After all, for the current Ali, the main theme is to refocus on the main business of e-commerce, and Ma Yun proposed to "return to Taobao, return to users, and return to the Internet", and it is no longer meaningful to dwell too much on the past.
But if you want to reawaken the morale and desire of Ali employees to win, you have to find out a few back-to-back heroes.
As Tsai said, Ali has been demoralized for the past three years. And this emotional depression may come from many aspects, from the perspective of value returns, the dream of financial freedom that employees of large factories have been pursuing in the past, with the suspension of Ant's listing, Ali's stock price has been cut in half, and it has been ruthlessly shattered.
In March this year, because they were dissatisfied with the long-term unfulfilled options promised by Ali, some Ali employees gathered at the gate of Xixi Park to defend their rights, and some employees even shouted the slogan of "asking for salary" at the scene.
At the level of social identity, in the past few years, as the Internet industry has generally encountered a cold winter, employees from Ali have gradually faded their halo, coupled with the rendering of negative news such as "Ali's black words", "workplace PUA", and "overtime culture", which also makes employees' mentality prone to fluctuations.
Morale seems to be something that cannot be seen or touched, but it is an indispensable thing for a company that wants to "start a new business".
For Jack Ma and Joe Tsai, from Lakeside Garden to today, they are bound to learn more about how much employee morale can help the business.
In November last year, Ma Yun made a rare appearance on the intranet to comfort Ali employees who were "sleepless at the moment" because he witnessed the soaring market value of Pinduoduo, and used the sentence "Ali will change, Ali will change" to appease the frustration of many Ali people.
How Ali changes and how Ali changes naturally starts from overthrowing the past, and the problems left by the Daniel Zhang era have naturally become the first targets.
But frankly speaking, these problems are by no means new diseases under Daniel Zhang's rule, but accumulated shortcomings that Ali has not paid attention to for more than two decades. In the past few years, stimulated by the external environment, these accumulated shortcomings finally exploded in a concentrated manner, becoming a thorn in the palm of the foot, making it difficult for the elephant to turn around.
As the helmsman who has been at the helm of Ali's big ship for four years, Daniel Zhang should indeed be responsible for this, but in the context of a larger narrative, Daniel Zhang needs to bear more responsibility than he actually does.
As Cai Chongxin and Wu Yongming are peeling off the Ali mark of the Daniel Zhang era little by little, the first "meritorious Ali person" in Ali's history has made great achievements, and I believe that Ali people themselves will have a fair evaluation.