Alibaba’s creator and founder Jack Ma announced his verdict on his retirement recently at the age of 54. He handed over the torch to Daniel Zhang or Zhang Yong and named him his descendant.
There sure must have been some strong reason that backed his choice; however, here in this article, we want to talk about the differentiating factor, which is his mindset with which he operates. So, what do you think is his USP (Unique selling point) or what is it makes him think and act differently? The differentiating factor, of course, is his attitude or approach. Daniel Zhang caught various eyeballs with the way he handled a Q&A session at a recent conference. You could catch that video on YouTube.
This was a Signal conference organised by P&G in the US back in 2016. So, what was so special about this Q&A session was Daniel’s response to a question asked about the lessons he had learnt from the failures he had gone through.
Do you know what Zhang responded? He told her about an example which happened in the recent years. It was about WeChat, which is very widely used in China. It was about three years ago that they decided to have their own WeChat or a social-chatting app. For this, they invested in a big way and to further mobilise it, they got many talented people on board to launch it. However, they realized soon after that top-down innovation is not a good idea in all situations and does not work.
But wait; the more interesting part of the story is yet to come. That social-chatting app couldn’t pick up and didn’t catch any eyeballs. But the good thing was that some people from the team deployed on this project didn’t give up. They tried to grasp the lessons they had learnt from this experience, which was incredible.
“They started a new application, today called ‘Ding talk’ this one is also a social chatting app but, it’s social chatting for work. It’s a chatting app with colleagues. And the amazing thing is that people who send the message can see the status of the message, whether it is read or not. This is very good for work for managers or bosses, right? You assign a task to a team, and you can see how quickly your team responds. For emails, a lot of people just read, and they don’t respond quickly, but with this app, people have no way to hide.”
So, what’s the point here? It’s important to understand that not each innovation will be always successful. More importantly, failing does not mean that we give up. One should learn to do some root cause analysis and find what happened and what are the lessons one could from it. The best part is that the younger generation today doesn’t give up so soon. They dig down till things make sense and are not scared of trying again even if they have failed the first time. The point here is that if we see globally, we will get many examples which prove that failures actually spur successes – a recent example of this is Ding Talk. We simply need to change our lens or outlook, which we use to view failure. Change your outlook or angle and see – the idea that leads to success would be just there.
