Alibaba CEO: 3 Things That Will Kill Your Company

While the size and scope of a multi-billion dollar tech company might not fit your circumstances (or mine), there’s still much to learn from the principles held by the leadership of such demonstrative success stories as Alibaba. When asked what the three most important elements of a good business are, the CEO wouldn’t answer. 

Instead, he offered a better question. “You should ask me what are the three worst things any company can do.” According to the notorious CEO, the following three things will kill your company:

1. Money
2. Plans
3. Technology 

While these three things might not be the first three that’d you’d list, the CEO stood by his answer. When asked to elaborate, a theme emerged.

When you’ve got too much cash on hand, it becomes a crutch. Businesses throw money at problems. Instead, they shoestring budget ideas until they become viable. 

Plans must be dynamic. A clear vision is key, but plans are obsolete as soon as they are written. Plans, he said, can pigeon hole the group and commit them to sunk cost fallacies. 

“Technology” is a surprising answer considering Alibaba is largely a tech driven company. That said, reliance on tech is a cop out to real solutions in the Alibaba culture. In the DEUCE culture, we call these solutions technical ones, which naturally don’t fare well in adaptive challenges. Alibaba reinforced this notion with an example of a customer service problem being a problem that cannot be “solved” with technology alone. This has kept the company human and its solutions tangible beyond the surface level. 

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