Jack Ma, the new management guru

Jack Ma is now the latest management guru. Goodbye to Peter Drucker, Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca!

And on top of that, you can also forget Michael Porter, Henry Mintzberg, W Chan Kim, not to mention Rosabeth Kanter, Tom Peters and a couple of others.

You can dispense with Niccolo Machiavelli and Sun-tze’s writings as well.

Jack Ma is indeed a phenomenon. For someone who was not educated in English, he delivers his talks in English so confidently!

I have watched a number of his talks. You cannot help being impressed or mesmerized. The messages are inspirational – you can make things happened if you really want to do it – the “Just like me!” type of evangelism.

But as you see more and more of it, you start to discern a pattern in his speeches. He shocks you into agreeing to his form of non-conventional wisdom. Of course, he has tons of examples to back up his contentions.

His Alipay has taken China by storm; even Lee Hsien Loong is impressed. I am seeing this App in Singapore’s taxis now. I thought I should also keep up with the kneah-sus in Singapore and therefore accessed Apple Store to down the App. I couldn’t go beyond the first few instructions, even though I have some working knowledge of Chinese. It is still very China- or Chinese-centric. I am just curious; for a man of Jack Ma’s global reach and ambition, how can the App be so “cheeeena”?

Jack Ma always claims that he applied to Harvard four times and was rejected every time. Of course, he is trying to tell you that you don’t need a Harvard MBA to make good. Maybe if he had been accepted by Harvard, he would already have become the emperor of the global business world by now?

I have always a nagging doubt about his “joke” about the Harvard part. If you want to go to Harvard, besides a good degree, you also need to sit for GMAT and score well. Usually there is no difficulty for many to do well in the quantitative parts, but to score well in the qualitative parts, where a high degree of proficiency in English is called for, that’s an extremely tall order for those whose principal education is not in English. Did he actually apply to go to Harvard?

I used to know a Dr Yap XXX. He claimed he had a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Manchester and an MBA from Strathclyde (or was it the other way around?). Every colleague took it as a matter of fact. Later, it dawned upon me that he had never used IRR or NPV in financial evaluations. And in another occasion, I found him totally muted when the subject of corrosion was brought up for discussion amongst colleagues. How can a PhD in Chemical Engineering not know something about corrosion? Obviously, he degrees cannot be real, can they? Don’t tell me standards in British universities are so bad!