Values support our mission, goals, and behaviors. Our first proposed value system was the "Nine Swords of the Lone Ranger". At that time, I just joined Ali, January 13, 2001, a Saturday, Jack Ma, I, Tsai Chongxin, Wu Yongming, Jin Jianhang, Peng Lei, we discussed seven or eight hours together, and finally we came up with nine values. Ma Yun and I are both fans of Jin Yong, Ma Yun first thought of the Nine Yin Zhen Jing, think about it is not right, that is Mei Chaofeng practiced a kind of sinister kung fu, and then immediately thought of the Dugu Nine Swords, because he always want to be Feng Qingyang.
Then I went back to my room in Hangzhou, where I live in the "four-sided ventilation, eight-sided exquisite" room (120 yuan a night room, I lived in this room for two years) - four-sided ventilation, we all know, eight-sided exquisite is! What they do, I know; what I do, they know. I was in the room thinking, what are we going to do with these nine values?
At that time, I thought of two dimensions, first of all, Ali is a very strong emphasis on innovation, so we have to have "passion", "innovation", "teaching and learning",
The first is that Ali is very much emphasizing innovation, so we need to be "passionate", "innovative", "teaching and learning" and "open".
In addition, when Ali did not have a system, we were like a bunch of ants running on the ground, Ma Yun like an eagle flying in the sky. Later I said we can not continue to use this method to do things, because we do not have a system. We have to build a very large carousel on the ground, carousel on top of a bracket, bracket on top of a missile, the missile follows the direction of Ma Yun, so we do not run around. Ma is still flying in the sky and we follow him through the system. At first, when we pushed the button, we might have missed the target even though we were close, but we quickly adjusted and hit it. The good news is that we hit one after another China supplier, honesty, Taobao, Alipay ...... these products are hit with this method.
What is the most important thing about this system? The most important thing is that we have a core, this core is "customer first". Just now we said, let the world no difficult business, as long as the businessman must use Alibaba, the target is the businessman, is everyone here.
The second value is "quality". There are two definitions of quality, the first is to satisfy customers; the second is that the highest performance today is the lowest requirement tomorrow. This is the only one that I brought to Ali from the outside, and all the other values are owned by Jack Ma and Ali themselves. "Today's highest performance is tomorrow's lowest requirement." What's the benefit of this value? You don't have to push all the young people if you can get them to believe that. If they do well, they themselves will say, "Today's highest performance is tomorrow's lowest requirement," and they will continue to do better next.
"Focus" is about doing the right thing. "Team" is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. "Simplicity" means following, but not sticking to, the workflow, making things simple.
In 2004, we refined the Nine Swords of the Lone Ranger into a more condensed value system called "Six Veins of the Divine Sword". At that time, we invited more than 300 coworkers to gather in a conference room and held a whole day meeting to ask everyone's opinion on values. We condensed it into six values: Customer First, Teamwork, Embrace Change, Integrity, Passion, and Dedication. At the company level, we need to support Customer First through teamwork and embracing change. At the individual level, we need people with integrity, passion, and dedication.
The story of GE values
CCTV "Dialogue" program of GE CEO Jeff Immelt's recording site. At that time, another guest Lenovo's Liu Chuanzhi asked Immelt, what is the most important thing for GE? Immelt said, just now I have given you the most important thing to GE: our values (card). Later, on another occasion, I also gave Immelt the Alibaba values card, and he was very happy to see me bring GE best practices to Alibaba.
An important one of GE's values is integrity. Immelt said GE manages more than 300,000 people in more than 200 countries and regions. I don't know what people do every day, and I shouldn't know what they do every day, but I do know that when it comes to life-and-death values issues, every one of them reacts in the same way. For example, if it's possible to get an order by paying a bribe, the reaction is the same whether it's in Shanghai, London, New York, Tokyo, or anywhere else in the world. .
I've worked at GE for 17 years, and many of the medical devices that GE sells in China are millions of dollars a piece, expensive machines. Many people told me, "Savio, you can't do business without kickbacks." That was back in the early 1980s, and I called all our sales people and told them to tell all our customers that GE doesn't do that. Back then about 70% of the market in China required kickbacks to do business. Everyone was very discouraged because only 30% of the market we could touch. I asked them to take 90% of the 30% we could touch. In the end, we took 25% of the market share in China without giving a dime in kickbacks. It's critical that you go out and say that.
Once I visited GE's U.S. office in Atlanta and saw a young man filling out a business trip reimbursement form. What shocked me was that, unlike the kind of lengthy reimbursement approval process in GE China, this young regular employee could actually approve his own reimbursement form and write his own company check to go to the bank to get reimbursed. It's remarkable that the company requires integrity and that the company treats its employees with great integrity, and this was about 30 years ago.
The history of Ali's business model also has an episode related to values. We had to burn almost 2 million dollars a month back then, and we only had 10 million dollars on hand, and the company would have died in a few more months. At that time, our B2B dream still existed, and we had a few punchy products, but not many people knew what the killer app was.
With only $9 million left, we were forced to reduce our burn rate to $500,000, when we asked ourselves a question that touched the depths of our souls: should we bribe or not? Ma rhetorically asked, "If we pay a bribe and something goes wrong, who will go to jail?" We were all delighted and pointed at him and said, "You go to jail." Ma said, "If I go to jail, will you visit me in jail?" We said, "If you go to jail, we'll meet together in jail."
So we are firmly against bribery, those who need to pay a bribe to do business will not do, and to help Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises to export this thing does not need to pay a bribe, we began to focus on this business, and finally finally in the B2B business to achieve a breakthrough. B2B business from 2000 to 2001 to do 1 billion U.S. dollars in sales, to feed the Ali.
During the SARS period, Ali employees insisted on doing a good job of customer service in isolation
When SARS occurred in 2003, the entire Alibaba company of more than 600 people were all quarantined. But we said, "We can be quarantined, but customer service can't be interrupted". As long as the customer calls in, all of our 600 employees will help him, will get on the phone and answer with an angelic voice, "Alibaba, hello". So no one knew we were quarantined because of SARS, and just stuck it out for two weeks and eventually survived the crisis.
Wu Juping and the little girl she "caught"
In July 2011, a little girl in Binjiang District, Hangzhou, fell from a high building, and many people were watching, but none of them did anything, and Wu Juping, an employee of Alibaba, rushed over to catch the girl and fractured her left hand. Fracture. For this matter, the company awarded her a "customer first award", as well as 350,000 yuan in bonuses, in order to commend her "at any time and place to maintain the image of Alibaba" behavior.