Alibaba's World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company is Changing the Face of Global Business**Selected as one of the Best Business Books of 2015 by the Wall Street Journal** In September 2014, a Chinese company that most Americans had never heard of held the largest IPO in history – bigger than Google, Facebook and Twitter combined. Alibaba, now the world's largest e-commerce company, mostly escaped Western notice for over ten years, while building a customer base more than twice the size of Amazon's, and handling the bulk of e-commerce transactions in China. How did it happen? And what was it like to be along for such a revolutionary ride? In Alibaba's World, author Porter Erisman, one of Alibaba's first Western employees and its head of international marketing from 2000 to 2008, shows how Jack Ma, a Chinese schoolteacher who twice failed his college entrance exams, rose from obscurity to found Alibaba and lead it from struggling startup to the world's most dominant e-commerce player. He shares stories of weathering the dotcom crash, facing down eBay and Google, negotiating with the unpredictable Chinese government, and enduring the misguided advice of foreign experts, all to build the behemoth that's poised to sweep the ecommerce world today. And he analyzes Alibaba's role as a harbinger of the new global business landscape—with its focus on the East rather than the West, emerging markets over developed ones, and the nimble entrepreneur over the industry titan. As we face this near future, the story of Alibaba—and its inevitable descendants—is both essential and instructive. |
What people are saying - Write a review
Alibaba’s World is a an autobiographical-business book hybrid that chronicles the rise of Alibaba-a Chinese e-commerce company from an apartment building to a company that challenges corporate goliaths E-Bay and Amazon. Porter Erisman knows what he’s talking about because he was the former VP at Alibaba. From his vantage point, Erisman writes about the the successes and to a lesser degree the failures of the company because Jack Ma wasn’t a conventional businessman who did things the way an MBA might have.
While the story itself is interesting, the book is perhaps most useful for the forty lessons gleamed from Alibaba found in the last section of the book. These represent universal wisdom that is not just helpful for business people, but everyday life as well things like don’t dwell on mistakes and don’t fear tough decisions. Overall, I came away from this book with both an education on Alibaba and inspired to take on new challenges in my own life.
The best autobiographical-business-inspirational book I’ve read
Contents
The Great Leapfrog Forward | 1 |
the Right Place the Right Time | 7 |
Boom | 15 |
Bust | 23 |
The Foreign Experts | 25 |
Alibabas Cave | 33 |
Around the World with Jack | 39 |
Alibabas Falling Carpet | 43 |
The eBayAlibaba Hotline | 113 |
Yahoo | 125 |
The Deal Heard Round the World | 137 |
The China Search Wars | 155 |
Free Is Not a Business Model | 161 |
AliMania | 169 |
Leaving Alibaba | 173 |
Winter | 179 |
Other editions - View all
Alibaba's World: How a remarkable Chinese company is changing the face of ... Porter Erisman No preview available - 2015 |