A well-organized, well-written account of how Alibaba grew from a tiny startup to a corporate giant.
A key Alibaba executive looks at the culture that has underpinned the company’s growth—and what it means for the world.
Wong has held a number of senior positions at Alibaba, including as founder Jack Ma’s special assistant for international affairs. Because he joined the company in its early days (he was the 52nd employee and first American), he is well positioned to track the company’s development and explain the culture expansion. The book has the feel of an official corporate history, and anyone who is looking for critical analysis or an account of Alibaba’s ethically dubious cooperation with China’s authoritarian rulers will not find it here. That said, Wong has plenty to discuss. His initial emphasis is on the company’s priorities: customers first, employees second, shareholders third. This might sound like anathema to American businesses but it has worked well, and shareholders have received good returns. Wong points out that 20 years ago China had thousands of dynamic small companies which had no way to reach customers. Alibaba provided the portal to link sellers and buyers in a digital mall. Unlike Amazon, it did not have to carry huge inventory loads, but the key problem was payment. Credit cards were rare in China, so the answer was to jump to cellphones as primary payment mechanisms. Alibaba overcame the trust issue with its own payment arm, Alipay. Wong emphasizes that Alibaba has eschewed detailed planning in favor of responding to problems as they arise. Ma, when he was CEO, had an eye for good tech people although he also recruited people who showed capacities for innovation and customer relations rather than programming skills. The company gives division, branch, and team leaders wide discretion in decisions, which was especially valuable when Alibaba started global expansion and had to learn new cultural environments. The book might have been given more depth by a considered examination of some of the company’s failures but nevertheless The Tao of Alibaba presents a different way of looking at business as well as telling the story of a company that has become a key part of the world economy.
A well-organized, well-written account of how Alibaba grew from a tiny startup to a corporate giant.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-0165-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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