How Ali changed, and how Ali changed, naturally began with the overthrow of the past, and the problems left by the era of Zhang Yong naturally became the first to be targeted.
Author | Pastoral
Source | Spiral Lab
Six months after leaving office from Ali, Zhang Yong's previous policies are being completely overthrown.
Cai Chongxin, the current chairman of Alibaba's board of directors, said in an interview with the media recently, "When we looked inside and reflected on the situation in the past few years, we found ourselves lagging behind because we forgot who our real customers are. We did not give the best experience to the users who use our applications to buy things."
Although Zhang Yong was not directly named in his words, it is not difficult to see that Cai Chongxin was not satisfied with Ali in the era of Zhang Yong.
Cai Chongxin and Zhang Yong are both CFOs. Zhang Yong is Cai Chongxin's predecessor according to the succession order. However, within Ali, Cai Chongxin is obviously older and has higher prestige, and his attitude seems to represent the current internal direction of Ali.
Cai Chongxin also said in the interview that Ali's morale has been low in the past three years, but if they can clearly convey the direction to employees, they will still be revitalized.
Cai Chongxin's interview was also recognized by Ma Yun. On April 10, Ma Yun posted a thousand word long post inside Ali, saying "Thank Joe for his courage and responsibility". At the same time, he also said: "It is not terrible to have mistakes, no one can not make mistakes. What is really terrible is not knowing, not admitting, and not correcting mistakes."
After Wu Yongming assumed the new CEO of Alibaba, he returned to the main business of e-commerce and focused on improving the user experience, which became the focus of Alibaba's work. Correspondingly, many old policies planned by Zhang Yong were also terminated.
1
Cai Chongxin and Ma Yun continued to speak
Cai Chongxin and Ma Yun's successive speeches focused on two main themes. First, they acknowledged that Ali had made directional mistakes in the past few years. Second, they continued to encourage employees to awaken the current low morale of Ali.
Half a year after Zhang Yong left office, Alibaba's low point in the past few years was finally discussed internally, and it was Ma Yun and Cai Chongxin who set the tone. Looking at the domestic Internet industry, this is also a more profound case of self-examination.
In addition to the decline in business, Cai Chongxin and Ma Yun mentioned the problems in Alibaba's internal management without an appointment. Cai Chongxin blamed the problems on the illness of large companies and human nature, while Ma Yun believed that Alibaba should return to efficiency and market first from an organization with slow decision-making.
If Ali has lost ground in market competition in the past few years, part of the reason can also be attributed to the dramatic changes in the external environment, but for its own inefficiency in organizational management, it directly targeted the senior managers represented by Zhang Yong.
In September last year, Zhang Yong announced that he would resign as Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud, saying goodbye to Alibaba in a nearly "naked retirement" way, and only taking away the honorary title of "meritorious Alibaba person" and $1 billion of technology fund investment.
In Cai Chongxin's internal letter of "farewell" to Zhang Yong, he mainly affirmed Zhang Yong's achievements in Alibaba over the past decade, including creating the Double 11 Shopping Festival, leading Tmall's rapid development, realizing Ali's wireless transformation and helping Ali successfully enter the world.
However, during the four years when Zhang Yong served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ali, he was only evaluated as "leading Ali to stabilize the market and overcome difficulties one after another."
Admittedly, Zhang Yong failed to create a new dynasty myth after he took full control of Ali, and his performance obviously failed to meet the expectations of Ma Yun and Cai Chongxin.
Especially in the past few years, Pinduoduo has also been allowed to rise rapidly, and has even completed the anti super market for Ali in terms of market value. The e-commerce business has almost presented a rival situation.
In Alibaba, both online reviews and employee morale have declined significantly in recent years. "Alibaba slang" has even become a popular topic for Internet companies. At the same time, the company's share price has shrunk and its business has declined, causing employees to feel great frustration both in terms of income and achievements.
In this case, Zhang Yong's "class ending" has become inevitable.
2
Ali erases the seal of Zhang Yong
If Zhang Yong's removal from all posts in Ali last year marked the end of his personal Ali era, the internal reform of Ali in the past half year has completely erased most of Zhang Yong's imprints in Ali.
First of all, in terms of organizational structure, after taking over as CEO of Ali, Wu Yongming made great efforts to promote the rejuvenation of the leadership team, and a large number of post-85 Ali Mesozoic began to take the lead.
In December of last year, Wu Yongming became the first to ignite the management team after serving as the CEO of Taotian Group. He promoted six young managers to lead the key businesses of Taotian Group at 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 anew".
At the same time, many Ali elders who had experienced the times of Ma Yun and Zhang Yong also voluntarily handed over their batons.
In March this year, Yu Yongfu, who had joined Alibaba for ten years, stepped down from his management positions in two major businesses, namely, Alma and Gao De, and transformed himself into an investor who continued to provide support to Alibaba. Shortly afterwards, Hou Yi, who created Hema Xiansheng, also announced his retirement and resignation as CEO of Hema, and will provide guidance to the company as the chief honorary adviser of Hema in the future.
Under the intensive adjustment of personnel, the spin off and listing plan promoted by Zhang Yong at the end of his term as CEO was also completely abolished.
In March last year, Zhang Yong issued an internal letter announcing that Ali would start to build a "1+6+N" organizational structure, implement the CEO responsibility system under the leadership of the board of directors of business groups and business companies, and take overall responsibility for their own business results.
The most eye-catching aspect of this major reform is that in the future, Ali's qualified business groups and companies will have the possibility of independent financing and listing.
After the launch of this reform plan, Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group, led by Zhang Yong, took the lead in announcing the launch of spin off and listing, and will introduce external strategic investors.
Zhang Yong believes that listing is not only listing itself, but also independently facing the higher requirements of the market.
Zhang Yong hopes that Ali will be able to produce several listed companies in the future, and several listed companies will be able to reproduce their children after several years, so as to create more listed companies. In this way, Alibaba's business can be considered prosperous and can solve the problem of "fighting for whom" for generations of employees.
However, only a year later, Alibaba's plans to spin off and list its business groups were called off. In November last year, when Ali released its quarterly financial report, it said that in view of various uncertainties, it would no longer promote the complete separation of cloud intelligence groups. At the same time, Hema's IPO plan has also been suspended.
In March this year, Alibaba also announced that in order to better strengthen the collaboration with Alibaba's e-commerce business and continue to support Cainiao to expand its global logistics network investment, it decided to withdraw Cainiao's listing application.
3
Ali urgently needs to regain his morale
From a commercial perspective, Cai Chongxin and Ma Yun's recent pronouncements are more about correcting deviations than criticizing the era of Ali Zhang Yong.
After all, for Alibaba at present, the main theme is to refocus on e-commerce. Ma Yun proposed to "return to Taobao, return to users, and return to the Internet". It is no longer meaningful to dwell too much on the past.
However, if we want to re awaken the morale and desire for victory and defeat of Alibaba's employees from the perspective of worldly wisdom, we have to find out a few people who carry the blame.
As Cai Chongxin said, Ali's morale has been low in the past three years. This emotional repression may come from many aspects. From the perspective of value return, the dream of wealth freedom that the employees of large factories have been pursuing in the past has been ruthlessly smashed by the sharp cut in Ali's share price with the suspension of the ant listing.
In March this year, some Alibaba employees gathered at the gate of Xixi Park to defend their rights on the spot because they were dissatisfied with the long-term non fulfillment of Ali's promised options. At the scene, some employees even shouted the slogan of "asking for salary".
At the level of social identity, as the Internet industry has generally experienced a cold winter in the past few years, employees from Alibaba have gradually lost their aura. In addition, the rendering of negative news such as "Alibaba slang", "workplace PUA", and "overtime culture" has also made employees' mentality vulnerable to fluctuations.
Morale seems invisible, but it is also an indispensable thing for a company that wants to "start again".
For Ma Yun and Cai Chongxin, from the lakeside garden all the way to today, they are bound to have a better understanding of how employee morale can help business.
In November last year, Ma Yun made a rare appearance on the intranet to comfort Alibaba employees who were "sleepless at the moment" because of the soaring market value of Pinduoduo, and comforted many Alibaba people with the words "Ali will change, Ali will change".
How Ali changed, and how Ali changed, naturally began with the overthrow of the past, and the problems left by the era of Zhang Yong naturally became the first to be targeted.
But frankly speaking, these problems are not new diseases under Zhang Yong's governance, but the accumulated disadvantages that Ali has not paid attention to in the past 20 years. Stimulated by the external environment in the past few years, these accumulated evils finally broke out and became a thorn in the palm of the foot, making it difficult for the elephant to turn around.
As the helmsman who has been in charge of Ali for four years, Zhang Yong should also be responsible for this, but in a more grand narrative context, Zhang Yong needs to bear more responsibilities than reality.
As Cai Chongxin and Wu Yongming are peeling off the Ali mark of Zhang Yong's era, the first "meritorious Ali person" in Ali's history will have a fair assessment of his own merits and demerits.
(Statement: This article only represents the author's view, not Sina.com's position.)
