(2017-12-19) All About Alibaba Ambition And Humility In The Companys Campus And Culture

All about Alibaba: ambition and humility in the company's campus and culture. Jack Ma’s fondness for martial arts stems in part from his admiration of the work of Jin Yong, a Hong Kong-based writer who published a series of adventure novels revolving around heroes and combat scenes. While published during the 20th century, the books are usually set in medieval Chinese history and draw on a long tradition of China’s wuxia, or martial arts-related fiction

The company’s values, for example, are dubbed the “Six Vein Spirit Sword,” which Ma borrowed from Jin Yong’s novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, whose characters are inspired by Buddhist (Buddhism) philosophy.

All employees at Alibaba choose a nickname for themselves. Originally, Alibaba staff drew from characters in Jin Yong’s martial arts novels

Nowadays, staff can take their nicknames from other inspiring characters too—Marvel superheroes and Korean dramas are popular, one employee told Quartz. These are used in all professional contexts—emails, group meetings, even performance reviews.

Brian Wong, Alibaba’s vice president of global initiatives and an employee since 1999, says Alibaba uses the nicknames, and the broader martial arts motif, to inspire staff to think of themselves as outsiders fighting for a cause.

Jin Yong’s characters, Wong says, are like “a brotherhood, like a band of brothers, it’s a group of people that are fighting for values of righteousness, loyalty.” “Often times they are sort of a peripheral group, they are not the mainstream. They have been shaped by things in their life they think are not fair or not right,” he adds.

Like many Chinese tech giants, Alibaba’s relationship with the government is close but complicated. Ma’s philosophy is to be “in love with the government [but] don’t marry them.” Recently though, as the company has grown more influential, the government has increasingly relied on it for its own purposes. Last year Alibaba company partnered with the Hangzhou government to monitor traffic data across the city. It also is working with the city’s housing bureau to develop an online marketplace for house rentals, powered by Ant Financial’s controversial social credit scoring system.