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As early as 1993, Professor James Moore heralded “the end of industry as a useful concept in contemplating business” and urged the adoption of the concept of business ecosystems as a potentially more insightful alternative.[1] Later, in their landmark strategy book or the early 2000s, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers, C.K. Prahalad and Ventkat Ramaswamy predicted that the linear value chain perspective on strategy would become more and more obsolete in the Internet age of ubiquitous connectivity where value increasingly would be “co-created” by producers and consumers interactively through the medium of real-time engagement platforms in an increasingly consumer-centric world.
More recently still, in The Power of Pull, strategy and innovation gurus, John Hagel III and John Seeley Brown, portrayed this ongoing trend towards an increasingly interactive competitive context as one that would shift away from traditional push-based production systems towards “scalable pull platforms” that will “make it easier to draw out people and resources on demand to respond to unexpected opportunities and challenges.”[2] These earlier “business ecosystem,” “co-creation,” and “power of pull” predictions of all of these experts have now come to characterize, what Harvard researchers Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani call our present-day “hub economy,” a competitive context being increasingly shaped by platform-based “digital superpowers” like Google, Amazon and Facebook in the West and Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba in the East.
What kind of new perspective on business, strategy and management will be needed to survive and thrive in this new competitive-cum-cooperative context? This is what Ming Zeng sets out to examine in his recent book, Smart Business: What Alibaba’s Success Reveals about the Future of Strategy, and as Chief of Staff and strategy adviser to Alibaba founder Jack Ma over 2006-2017, he is particularly well-placed to do so. Ming Zeng is currently Chairman of the Academic Council of Alibaba Group and Dean of Hupan School of Entrepreneurship, founded by Ma and other Chinese leaders. His previous book, Dragons at Your Door, co-authored with Peter Williamson, remains one of the leading sources on the strategies of leading Chinese companies.
His interviewer, Brian Leavy, is emeritus professor of strategy at Dublin City University Business School ([email protected]) and a Strategy & Leadership contributing editor.
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