In 1982,
Jack Ma failed his first college entrance examination.
Altogether he took 3 times before he passing the exam. When the first time he
failed, he dreamed to be a hotel waitress or policeman, however he was been
rejected because his appearance. Although Jack Ma failed many times, but he
never give up. In 1994, he started his business, founded the first translation
agency “Haibo” in Hangzhou. In order for the company to continue
operating, he started his part-time life by selling the crafts, socks and flashlight.
Jack ma visited the United States, at
that time he got the opportunity contact to the internet. He created his first
internet company in china and the product is “China Yellow Pages”. Due to the different business concept, Jack
Ma abandoned his “China Yellow Page”. After that, he resigned his post in EDI,
his second company, an information technology company. He foundered Alibaba as
a business to business (B2B) marketplace site in March. Alibaba is a China-
based business to business marketplace site which is expected to improve the
domestic e-commerce market and perfect an e-commerce platform for Chinese
enterprises. Well to say that Jack Ma may through this process very
understanding of failure is an option. He was overcome the hardship in
his business and today he is the richest man of Asia.
One of the
traits that Jack Ma having to became a successful entrepreneur is open
culture. In 1994, he heard about the internet and he went to the United States
at the early of 1995. He got introduced to internet with his friends' help. As
the first encounter he searched the word "beer". He was wondered
because although he found information related to beer from many countries, but
nothing from China. He was surprised again once he tried to search for general
information about China and the answer was nothing again. So from there, he and
his friend created an "ugly" website related to China. Within five
hours of creating the website he had received emails from some Chinese who wishing
to know about him. This makes him realized that the internet had something
great to offer. In April 1995, Jack Ma, his wife and a friend collected twenty
thousand dollars and started an internet company. Their company was dedicated
to creating websites for companies. He named their company "China Yellow Pages."
Within three years, his company had made ¥5,000,000 which was equivalent to U$800,000.
He also introduced the Alipay system to this world. He keeps spreading about
his service around people. The open culture character that Jack Ma having was
helped him a lot to be one of successful entrepreneur in the world and became a
known business man to this world.
Moreover, Jack Ma also is an example of entrepreneur
with team-oriented character. In 1999, as a prelude to his business, he had
set up a team with his 17 friends in his apartment at the lakeside gardens in Hangzhou.
The group was established for focusing on building their own online
marketplace. In the makeshift headquarters, he gave talk about his plan to
make a great start-up so that china can compete on the world. Even as the team
began to grow, Alibaba felt more like a close-knit family. He created an ethos
of being scrappy little company towards a large business to motivate the team.
When Alibaba is steadily developing and gaining profit, he provided every
employee with a can of silly string. The team also created a fun atmosphere so
that all the staff eager to do their job. He got the team working on it to do
hand stands during breaks to keep their energy levels up in the early
2000’s. Jack Ma was not someone that keeping all the equity for himself
and really hoarding all of the wealth and riches. He was able to get an amazing
performance out of his team by empowering his workers with an ownership
mentality. In the business context, Jack Ma never just about him but the team.
Jack Ma is also an opened risk-taker because
of he dared to take the risk to challenge the status quo that was supported by
many years of conventional wisdom about business and competition in the digital
age. Besides that, he believed partnership is very important to his business
and it will help him to manage his business become more systematically. However,
his unconventional way of thinking is placing customers as his first priority,
partners as his second priority and lastly the shareholders which he already
took the risk and challenged it. As we knew that china is the country that
treated women as inferior to men, but, Jack Ma was taking the risk and
challenge it. In his company, there are total 47% of the employees are women
and most of them are company’s top executives. By this, it will balance the
leaderships and ideas to conduct business efficiently.
Last but not
least, jack ma is definitely a visionary
entrepreneur, he certainly process the ability to look into the future and know
what will happen in the future, he sees the opportunity that others don’t. Rebecca Fannin, an author and journalist have
interviewed Jack Ma and conclude that he is a true visionary. Due to his visionary 16 years ago, he started
the Alibaba with his 17 friends in his apartment, while now, Alibaba become the
largest online retailer in china and handled $248 billion of transaction. The success of the company is due to the
ability of Jack Ma to look into the future and see the opportunity and
possibilities that other do not know, this is how Jack Ma leads the company
into the golden path of success. Short
to say, his fail his effort and hard work can be summarize into one word, that
is “visionary”.
From the explanation above, we could conclude Jack Ma is known by the
world today because he practiced the various types of entrepreneur traits such
as failure is an option, open culture, team oriented, open risk taker and
visionary. Besides the business
knowledge and traits, there are still many factors that could determine one`s
success. Success is not something that
can be achieve easily, one need to put in time, money, passion and effort. I would like to end the essay with a quote by
jack ma “if you don’t give up, you
still have a chance”.
