Decisive
Ability To Learn From Mistake
Ethical Consciousness
Foresight
Initiative
Initiative can be interpreted as the power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do. Jack Ma is very interested in learning English from an early age. In order to learn English, he takes initiative by waking up early every morning and rode his bike to the Hangzhou Hotel and used to provide free guided tours around his home city for tourists (Tobak, 2014) . This act has been performed by him for nine years in order to practice English. Besides that, Ma also bought a radio so that he could listen to the English broadcast everyday to improve his English proficiency.
When Ma travelled to the United States, he was amazed by the internet. He tried to search on World Wide Web for information on beer, but the result did not turn up a single Chinese option. He rarely can find anything about China on the Internet in fact. So, he decided to take initiative by setting up an Internet company known as China Pages. China Pages is one of the China's first officially registered Internet companies and is a business index site. He wants to bring China online, because at that time only 1% of the population was on the web. After all, China Pages failed.
Ma was determined to try again by setting another Internet companies, Alibaba with 17 friends in 1999. Internet gets the attention of Wall Street in the U.S at that time. The team set up their website called Alibaba.com. This website is a business-to-business online marketplace that connects exporters from China with oversea buyers. This website enables buyers to browse the products of exporters. This feature started to attract members from all around the world. Alibaba also faced competition from eBay that is moving aggressively into China. Jack Ma decided to take initiative to create Taobao, a consumer-to-consumer platform in 2003. Mr. Ma decided to keep Taobao free, in order to compete for market shares. As the result, Taobao had dominated the domestic China online market.
Decisive
Jack Ma is a most successful Chinese entrepreneur and ranked as the richest man in China. Jack Ma is the founder of Alibaba Group, which provides internet based businesses. Nowadays, Alibaba Group has become one of the world’s largest private technology companies. Almost 100 million people are attracted to shop with Alibaba Group per day with estimated worth of $20 billion.
In 1999, Jack Ma established Alibaba Group with 17 friends, Jack Ma and his friends start-up new business, Alibaba Group, which is a business to business marketplace with 500 000 Yuan,. Jack Ma played a decisive role in managing Alibaba Group. Under Jack Ma served as the CEO of Alibaba Group, it has met an extraordinary achievement. Most of the China’s customers prefer to shop at Alibaba Group compared to Western sites as Alibaba Group is specially attuned to the customers’ needs and culture. Jack Ma also made Alibaba Group leading in the e-commerce portal in foreign countries like Brazil and Russia without having any employees in those countries.
Besides, Jack Ma also wanted to improve the e-commerce system. Therefore in 2003, Jack Ma made a decisive action by founding Taobao, Alipay, AliMama and so on. Due to the great successful of Taobao, E-bay made an offer to Jack Ma to purchase Taobao, however Jack Ma rejected it. He later received the $1 billion of investment support from Yahoo’s co-founder, Jerry Yang.
Jack Ma also took a decisive action by promoting Alipay, which is a payment service. This kind of payment service is used widely by China’s customer. The function of Alipay is quite similar compared to PayPal and is accepted by other companies. It processes almost 75 percentages of the Alibaba’s Group transactions.
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group is an entrepreneur who has the ability to learn from mistake. In 3rd March of 2015, Jack Ma went to Taiwan and had a talk about his career life with over two thousand student in National Taiwan University sport centre. In his talk, he shared that the six important reasons that make him success in his career.
One of the reasons that make Jack Ma success was that he has the ability to learn from mistake that he faced. He said that “The greatest wealth of a human is failure.” In his talk, he shared that he faced lots of failure and he had been rejected by more than 10 job occupations. Due to the failure that Jack Ma faced, the people surrounding him started lost hope on him. His parents do not think about his success and his wife said that he would never become the richest man.
In 1999, China does not familiar with the e-commerce, Jack Ma and his partner had been rejected by a lot of company about their internet company which named “China Yellow Pages”. However due to Jack Ma’s ability to learn from mistake, he finally earned 800,000 US dollars within three years with Alibaba Group.
However, Jack Ma started to used to learn from his mistake or failure, he felt that mistake and failure is normal in his life, he also notice that lots of failure will bring successful once. The failure of his starting point had made the Jack Ma today. Since he had been work as a teacher before, he learned how to work with other, understand others. Lastly, Jack Ma said that the failures he faced give him the opportunity to learn more things.
Ethical Consciousness
One of the entrepreneurial traits possessed by Jack Ma is ethical consciousness. Jack Ma is a committed advocator for corporate social responsibility. The first environmental issue he began to deal with is the shark fin issue. Since then, he began to pay attention to social issues and treat them very seriously. As shark fin are harvested cruelly, he boycotts food products from shark fin. He did not force Alibaba team to remove shark fins from their e-commerce platforms but he had significantly influence them. In 2009, the young people in his company decide to ban the sale of shark fin products on their sites. At the same year, the shark fin products are also prohibited from Alibaba’s subsidiary Taobao.com.
Besides, he mentions that business people like them are doing it because they know it is crucial instead for public relations reasons. They are taking action for the sake of themselves, their children and their families. Jack Ma thinks that the most fun part of the business to him is to contribute to the future and making healthy money which enable people to enjoy their lives. He also believes that business leaders and entrepreneurs should always remember their initial dreams which were to contribute to society instead of generating high profits. For him, high profit is only a by-product and result of a business. Thus, he always put customers and employees at the first and second place while the shareholders in the third place. (An Interview with Jack Ma, 2009)
Jack Ma appears to have ethics, both in his business practices and his own personal lifestyle. He is also appointed as being both socially and environmentally responsible on the Alibaba site.
Foresight
Foresight is the ability to predict what happen or be needed in the future. Jack Ma is a market leader. He believes that a good leader should have foresight. A good leader will anticipate how decisions will play out ahead of other people. He also should try to move one step ahead of the competition. Jack Ma believes that a great leader that has foresight will take time to develop creative and innovative thinking skills into the business.
Jack Ma had the foresight by going into the e-commerce area. The e-commerce titan’s rise to riches owes much to the innovation and foresight of its leadership. 16 years ago, Jack Ma had told Wall Street investors that he was going to develop business-to-business (B2B) in China. Unfortunately, nobody showed any interest about the B2B. He saw the lack of brick-and-mortar infrastructure in China. Then, he decided to build an online marketplace. This shows hidden foresight and persistence in his business.
Besides that, Jack Ma had the foresight to launch a Singles Day sale on his company’s online platforms in 2009. At that time, mobile computing, social media and e-commerce were beginning to take off and this was the opportunity for him to expand his business quickly and successfully. Furthermore, Jack Ma chose to give his business an English name. This is because he would be able to appeal to a global audience. (Choo) All of these evidence showed that Jack Ma had a high degree of foresight.
In conclusion, Jack Ma’s business philosophy and foresight have made him to be a successful businessman in the world.
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