Smart Business: What Alibaba’s Success Reveals about the Future of Strategy, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Smart Business: What Alibaba’s Success Reveals about the Future of Strategy. Available from Amazon here. See more book reviews here.

How Strategy Works in an Interconnected, Automated World

Leaders already know that the classic approach to strategy–analyze, plan, execute–is losing relevance. But they don’t yet know what replaces it. As everyone and everything becomes more interconnected and digitized, how do you operate, compete, and win?

Ming Zeng, the former Chief of Staff and strategy adviser to Alibaba Group’s founder Jack Ma, explains how the latest technological developments, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, the mobile internet, and cloud computing are redefining how value is created. Written especially for those outside the technology industry or the startup arena, this book introduces a simple, overarching framework to guide strategy formulation and execution in this data-rich and highly interactive environment.

Revealing the revolutionary practices that he and his team have developed at Alibaba, Zeng shows how to:

• Automate decisions through machine learning
• Create products informed by real-time data from customers
• Determine the right strategic positioning to maximize value from platforms and suppliers
• Repurpose your organization to further human insight and enable creativity
• Lead your company’s transformation into a smart business

With insights into the strategies and tools used by leaders at Alibaba and other companies such as Ruhan and Red Collar, in a variety of industries from furniture making to banking to custom tailoring, Smart Business outlines a radically new approach to strategy that can be applied everywhere.

Smart Business: What Alibaba’s Success Reveals about the Future of Strategy, reviewed

If you think China is a coming force in mobile payments and e-commerce innovation then you may well be about ten years behind the curve. There has been an impressive success and wide proliferation of Alibaba across so many areas of Chinese life. This deep penetration into everyday daily life of almost all of the Chinese population has had wide ranging impacts, not all good, and some of deep concern to western privacy and freedom of speech advocates.

Ming Zeng’s account of his experiences with Alibaba are well worth reading in this context as he was so closely involved in helping the company to expand and grow it’s reach and business impact. You may not agree with the wide ranging reach that they have achieved, but it makes sense to at least understand how they did it, what strategies they adopted and how they continued to grow it.

We find Chinese innovation and companies highly interesting and well worth watching. This book by Ming Zeng is an important addition to the growing literature in this area.

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