Savio Kwan and Alibaba story

I saw Savio after he presented at the Global Leadership Summit at London Business School in June 2010.  Savio is a non-executive director and one of the founders of Alibaba.com.  We invited him to present to a group of 50 of the brightest and best at an event in Shanghai.  I had never been to Shanghai before and all the misconceptions were exactly that.  All the preconceptions, were awry.  The scale, the variety and the imagination of the place is truly astounding.  The conference coincided with the Shanghai Expo - which had about 50 million visitors in 4 months of 2010.  We attended on a quiet day and there were 300,000+ visitors there.  Amazing and incomprehensibly massive in scale.  We scratched only the surface.  We did though get a look at Thomas Heatherwick’s design for the UK pavilion which was worth the trip.  [See our Gallery].  The thing that struck me about Shanghai was that - like London - or in a way, New York - a dirty great big busy river runs right through it.  There is definite sense of the being either side of a City parted by quarter of a mile of dark water.  We went out to Hangzhou to see Alibaba’s headquarters.  13,000 young people work in an internet firm that is less than a decade old and had over 650 million customers (that’s 650,000,000 customers!....) through Alibaba and Taobao.  Savio was there at the beginning with Jack Ma and told the delegates the story of how a small group of friends created something in a room above a flat on the banks of Hangzhou.  It now dominates the “e-Bay” style self trading market across China.  But the thing that struck me and the delegates most was not the tale of setting up an organisation that went from an idea in a small office to the multi-billion turnover organisation, but that the organisation was and is founded on very clear VALUES.  I know many of us work for organisations where the “values” thing is banded around - by the HR manager or posted on the CEO’s intranet site.  Here - and evidenced with our own eyes when we walked through the acres of offices on the Alibaba campus - the VALUES are plastered everywhere.  On every workstation, in corridors, on the walls, in the literature they publish.   The place and the people you meet are imbued with them.  Powerful.  Savio is remarkable, unassuming and eloquent about doing business in China.  That he shares that story, wonderfully communicating a strong sense of values: for people and openness, honesty and the real development of people is great to hear.  Memorable, impactful and at times very very moving indeed.  Hats off.  Wonderful speaker.

Dongcha.