Jack Ma and his inconveniently big mouth
Credit to Author: BEN KRITZ, TMT| Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2019 16:19:01 +0000
JACK Ma, the unfortunate-looking tycoon behind the online commerce giant Alibaba, recently sparked an outpouring of existential angst in the social media realm by declaring that anyone not willing to work at least 72 hours a week was not welcome in his company, and would probably be a failure due to lack of commitment in any endeavor.
Apparently, tech workers at Alibaba are expected to work 12 hours a day, six days a week and like it; Ma, who is apparently tireless himself, explained he believed that is the minimum amount of time necessary for one to feel and express joy in his or her work.
That sort of thinking is offensive to Western sensibilities, and especially the unambitious working style that prevails in this culture. The oriental preference for brute force instead of efficiency is completely alien to our way of thinking, which can be summed up as, “one should work to live, not the other way around.”
This is not the first time Jack Ma has set tongues wagging and heads shaking with one of his unpopular opinions. Several years ago, Ma ignited a different controversy by frankly asserting there is really nothing wrong with often-scorned “knock-off” products manufactured in great quantities in China. While he was careful to condemn outright counterfeits, Ma’s reasoning was that since many of the factories were the same ones making Western-branded products, their acquired knowledge and access to the same raw materials meant that anything they produced on their own hook ought to be just as good, and might in some instances even be superior.
That point of view was taken as a direct challenge to the prevailing attitude toward intellectual property (IP) protection, which seems to be exactly how Ma meant it. Counterfeit and substandard products hurt everyone’s bundle, his included, Ma stressed, but efforts to stop IP theft and harmful counterfeiting are failing, because they can’t differentiate an actual problem from what is not.
That is the thing about Jack Ma that makes others uncomfortable and defensive: He is unpleasant and says provocative things, but he cannot be simply ignored because the man is, after all, as rich as Croesus. He obviously knows what he is doing, and anyone with even a shred of entrepreneurial ambition would do well to learn from him. It is just rather shocking to some people to learn that the overall philosophy that has guided his success contains more than a few elements that anyone outside of places like China and maybe Japan and Korea find horrifying.
What really gets under people’s skin is that, upon reflection, Jack Ma’s most obnoxious observations are for the most part correct. There was a time when Chinese manufacture was a laughably poor imitation of the “real thing,” but the Chinese in general are as adroit learners as they are imitators, and much of what they now produce does not deserve the jingoistic stigma attached to it. And like it or not, Western brands are as much to blame as the Chinese for compromised IP. Specific designs and unique processes can be protected, but there is no stopping the sort of soft technology transfer that happens once a more advanced brand farms out its manufacturing to a country like China. Mere exposure allows workers and managers to learn all sorts of things, much of which falls under the hard to define realm of “experience.” Even if those workers and managers, after becoming entrepreneurs, consciously avoid copying what they used to make, the working rhythm, the knowledge of how parts of a process work together, and knowledge of the market guide them into doing something that, if not similar, is certainly comparable.
Ma’s assertion that one essentially needs to choose between having a job and having a life is likewise just an acknowledgement of reality. For all of Western human resource thinking that centralizes concern for the “work-life balance,” there is a tacit acceptance that if one wishes to get ahead, one needs to put in the time. The only people who are working 40-hour work weeks are the ordinary workers, the interchangeable cogs in the machine. They are no less vital or valued for it, because after all the machine wouldn’t run; but the people who build the machine in the first place devote their life to doing so, even if they bemoan the necessity, because it just doesn’t get done any other way.
Whether or not reality is right or wrong, Jack Ma and his big mouth serve as a reminder that, if one wants to get ahead, this is the way of things. We might despise him for it, but when that is coming from a guy who started with little more than a head full of ideas and now could buy you and everyone you know, we ought to listen.
Email: ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
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