Abstract The article focuses on visions and ethics for business leadership. It states that long-term original vision exerts significant role in Jack Ma's business career. With a long-term original vision, Ma found the large demand of cyber business in advance and seized venture capital. With a long-term original, he defeated eBay in e-commerce business. His vision of focusing on small businesses made his company become stronger and stronger. Moreover, it comments that organizational culture is the most important part of organizational ethics. Ma advocates organizational culture such as integrity, customer first, competent management team, embracing change, healthy and positive enterprise value etc.
Keywords: e-commerce, original ,vision, organizational, culture, ethic
As a successful business leader, Jack Ma has created compelling miracles during 14 years development and struggles. Ma is the lead founder, chairman, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Hangzhou-based Alibaba Networking Technology Company. He is responsible for the overall strategy and focus of Alibaba Group. Alibaba Group was founded in 1999 and now Alibaba.com has become the world's largest business-to-business e-commerce platform. Taobao was established in 2003. Its main business was to provide a payment platform for merchants and buyers, and this platform made people more quick and convenient to shop on line. By the end of 2009, Taobao had registered 170 million members. According to statistics, Taobao transactions amount in 2012 went beyond 1000 billion RMB yuan. Jack has been honored with many awards and honors since the founding of Alibaba Networking Technology Company. In 2001, Ma was selected by the World Economic Forum as a “Young Global Leader”. In 2005, Ma was named one of the “25 Powerful Businesspeople in Asia” by Fortune. In May 2009, Ma was honored by Time magazine with inclusion into the Time 100 list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In 2010, Ma was selected by Forbes Asia as one of “Asia’s Heroes of Philanthropy” for his contribution to disaster relief and poverty. Long-term original visions exert a crucial role in Ma's entrepreneurship management. According to a journal called Fire Engineering, "If you want to be an effective leader within your organization or beyond, you must have a vision, the passion to make it work, and the ability to communicate it at all times and at all costs. Most importantly, you must first believe in it yourself." (Kanterman,139) For Ma, he believed he would always find opportunities since he saw things differently. Consequently he established his business from 10 thousand dollars to 40 billion dollars, from 18 founders to 17,000 employees, from 1 member to 30 million members through his incredible vision. He not only has a vision, but also has a long-term original vision. This vision reflects his concern about future tendency, sustainable strategy and development direction of his company. Long-term original visions embody Ma's foresight and forethought. When he started his business, Ma's asset was worth 10 thousand dollars. However, operating costs was estimated to be 10 million dollars. Ma was very smart. He went to make a speech to the various universities, to e-commerce network meetings and forums preaching his B2B model. Weird looks, eloquence and provocative thoughts invariably astonished the audience. Ma overseas media began to show great enthusiasm. Fortunately, Ma had two intentions for his nonstop lecture tour around the world. One was to attract customers, the second was to attract venture capital. After 38 venture capitalists refuse, Ma received a 5 million dollars investment from the group led by Goldman. Later, Ma went to Beijing to "see a mysterious figure." That person was the largest shareholder of