Smart Business ― What Alibaba's Success Reveals About the Future of Strategy

Executives already know that the classic approach to strategy--analyze, plan, execute--is losing relevance as the business landscape becomes more interconnected and automated. But they don't yet know what replaces the traditional strategy toolkit. Some executives even think that strategy is dead.

According to Ming Zeng, the Chief Strategy Officer of the Alibaba Group, strategy is decidedly not dead, but it is radically changed. He has spent over a decade observing how companies in the Alibaba Group and the firms it does business with are becoming "smarter," through interconnected networks that facilitate hundreds of thousands of simultaneous interactions every second and the algorithms that learn from all those interactions to automatically and continually improve the decisions and actions companies take on behalf of serving their customers. Zeng explains how strategy is fundamentally redefined--bearing little resemblance to the principles, practices, and frameworks he learned as a PhD student and then taught as a professor in academic institutions around the world--when companies are "smart."

Revealing the revolutionary practices that he and his team have adopted at Alibaba to leverage these technological trends, Smart Business provides the new toolkit for formulating and executing strategy. Informed by the cutting-edge practices of Alibaba and other companies around the world, this book builds on the author's previous academic research to put Alibaba's strategies and approaches into a broader context that applies to all businesses, not just internet companies or startups. The result is a book that describes a radical new approach to strategy and shows how companies everywhere can apply it.

Ming Zeng is the Chief Strategy Officer at Alibaba Group, a position he has held since 2006. Previously, he was Professor of Strategy at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business from 2002 to 2006 and at INSEAD prior to 2002. He wrote one of the first cases on Alibaba in 2000. His book, Dragons at Your Door, coauthored with Peter Williamson and published by Harvard Business Review Press, remains one of the most cited books about strategies of leading Chinese companies. He is a frequent contributor to management journals such as Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Journal of International Business Studies, MIT Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, and Harvard Business Review, and he speaks regularly at conferences and seminars around the world.

He resides in Hangzhou, where the Alibaba Group is headquartered, and in Silicon Valley, where he is in charge of group investment and business development for the company.

Author social media/website info: linkedin.com/in/ming-zeng-7ba269117