Duncan Clark

Take a look at the title of the book: "Alibaba : The House That Jack Ma Built". Now ask yourself: what will this book be about?
A. Alibaba, the company founded by Jack Ma
B. Jack Ma, the Chinese entrepreneurial tycoon
C. The situation in China wrt entrepreneurship, online businesses and the Internet.
D. The various e-commerce businesses in China, whether those in direct competition with Alibaba's sites or those providing supporting services such as online payment, logistics, etc.

The answer shall show more be revealed later in this review. Hold your horses until then. :P

There's no doubting the Alibaba magic, or Jack Ma's role in revolutionising e-commerce in China. Jack Ma is almost entirely self-made. An average student coming from a regular middle-class family, Ma describes himself as “100% made in China” as he hasn't studied abroad. He learnt English from his parents and by reading books and then practising his conversational skills with tourists. Ma left his teaching job behind when the entrepreneurial bug bit him. After two failed attempts, he hit the jackpot with Alibaba. Today, the company hosts the largest B2B (Alibaba.com), C2C (Taobao), and B2C (Tmall) marketplaces in the world with an annual revenue of $72 billion. As a person, Jack Ma is simple, humorous and technology-averse. (The last point is quite ironic, considering his entire wealth is based on technological development.) He is known to be a great orator, but he never prepares for his speeches, preferring to speak without notes. He firmly believes in “Customers first, employees second, shareholders last”, and emphasises on the importance of supporting small businesses on his websites. Every single aspect of him points at a person who has gone far beyond what should have been possible for him in a communist country. This should have been such an interesting and inspiring journey to read about.

Unfortunately, it isn’t. Reason: Duncan Clark.

Ideally, the book should have focused on all four of the points I wrote at the start, but with a greater focus on A and B, especially as it has Jack Ma on the cover. The Goodreads blurb suggests that the main focus will be on Jack Ma with a secondary focus on Alibaba. What we actually get is a potful of A, a spoonful of B and a barrelful of C and D, each.

Other than Jack Ma and Alibaba, the book talks of competitor strategies of ecommerce companies in China and other Asian countries such as those of eBay, Yahoo and PayPal (who competed with AliPay), the dot-com boom and bust and resurgence, the subsidiary industries that developed in China because of the internet, the Chinese attitude towards online shopping then and now, the counterfeit goods problem and the action being taken with respect to the same, the financial struggles of the companies after the American financial crisis of 2008,… Basically, it goes all over the place and covers whatever topics Clark deemed fit to include. Furthermore, there is not much structure to the content. Rather, Clark goes where his mind takes him, leaving us to remember what the original point of that section was.

I would have still let this aberration go, if the book were written in an engrossing way. Sadly, Duncan Clark might be an expert on the Internet and entrepreneurship in China, but a writer he is not. The book is written in a bland manner even though the content is so interesting. When I saw sentences such as “Let us take a brief tour’ or “Let us look more into this”, I was reminded of all those dreary textbooks I’ve left behind eons ago.

That said, there are many precious gems to be found in the content. You get a crash course on how to run a successful business with the various anecdotes scattered in the story, both related to Jack Ma as well as the other ecommerce magnates. In a world where businesses are increasingly concentrating on the bottom line, Jack Ma teaches you that focussing on the entire value chain, right from suppliers to customers, ensures greater long-term rewards. We also see how the one-size-fits-all approach of international companies doesn’t work; the local culture and ideology has to be taken into consideration if you want to be a success. So if you can keep all quibbles regarding the haphazard composition of the book, you will definitely stand to benefit from its content.

Oh, but how I wish someone like Ashlee Vance would have written this book! :/

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Some people praise Jack Ma for all of his achievements and for what he has done with his life so far, and others hate his guts to a very large extent and immensely dislike him because he supposedly sells cheap and crappy stuff over the internet. But none of us truly knows his true personality, and none of us truly knows the true brilliance of his character, so we shouldn't judge him by his guest appearances and by the nature of his harsh and sometime immensely educative inspirational words. show more He's no doubt a very wise man who has faced a lot of adversities, and this great book shares a few titbits of his life prior he became one of the world's richest and one of the world's most respectful businessmen, and it shows you immensely that everything is possible for as long as you have clear vision, faith, and believe in your craziest dreams. show less

More like 3.5 stars. I’m a big fan of Jack Ma and Alibaba, but this biography just didn’t do a great job of introducing the reader to him. It was adequate, but focused on a lot of pointless details in some places, and short on facts and analysis on other places. It is especially hard to see how replicable what he did really is. The book felt sometimes fawning to a degree which really calls into question overall objectivity, too.

This is an interesting book, more because of the stance it really doesn't take, it debates some of the points about ethical shopping and how people have to do something about the ways in which we're disrupting the planet but at no stage does it really suggest "one true way". It offers choices and ideas and further reading.

Interesting food for thought.