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. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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Everyone’s favorite avuncular socialist sends up a rousing call to remake the American way of doing business.
“In the twenty-first century we can end the vicious dog-eat-dog economy in which the vast majority struggle to survive,” writes Sanders, “while a handful of billionaires have more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.” With that statement, the author updates an argument as old as Marx and Proudhon. In a nice play on words, he condemns “the uber-capitalist system under which we live,” showing how it benefits only the slimmest slice of the few while imposing undue burdens on everyone else. Along the way, Sanders notes that resentment over this inequality was powerful fuel for the disastrous Trump administration, since the Democratic Party thoughtlessly largely abandoned underprivileged voters in favor of “wealthy campaign contributors and the ‘beautiful people.’ ” The author looks squarely at Jeff Bezos, whose company “paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018.” Indeed, writes Sanders, “Bezos is the embodiment of the extreme corporate greed that shapes our times.” Aside from a few passages putting a face to avarice, Sanders lays forth a well-reasoned platform of programs to retool the American economy for greater equity, including investment in education and taking seriously a progressive (in all senses) corporate and personal taxation system to make the rich pay their fair share. In the end, he urges, “We must stop being afraid to call out capitalism and demand fundamental change to a corrupt and rigged system.” One wonders if this firebrand of a manifesto is the opening gambit in still another Sanders run for the presidency. If it is, well, the plutocrats might want to take cover for the duration.
Even if they're pie-in-the-sky exercises, Sanders’ pitched arguments bear consideration by nonbillionaires.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593238714
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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