Last week Jack Ma’s company, Alibaba Group–a family of Internet-based business–appeared in the stock market on Wall Street and he thus becomes the richest man in China and ranks 24th on Forbes with a net worth of  $21.8 billion. It’s a really huge news to us and suddenly Jack Ma, the founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, becomes the focus of almost every one’s discussion.

It’s not truly a surprise I think, at the beginning of the year I saw a movie called American Dreams in China(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dreams_in_China),which tells a similar story of 3 entrepreneurs struggling to make their ‘American Dream’ come true. Ma, a man of ordinary birth and ordinary family, makes all his way to Wall Street. He deserves to be the most successful entrepreneur and philanthropist of China.

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At early age, Ma decided to learn English well so he rode his bike to a   hotel nearby every morning to practise talking to foreigners there. Later in his youth, he fail the entrance exam twice and attended Hangzhou Tearcher’s Institute, which is quite similar to American Entrepreneurs like Mark Zukerberg and Bill Gates who quitted college to start up. Ma first started building websites for Chinese companies with the help of friends in the US. He has said that “the day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house,” and on a very slow dial-up connection, “we waited three and a half hours and got half a page…. We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed.”

In 1995, Ma founded China Yellowpages, which is believed to be China’s first Internet-based company.He then founded Alibaba in 1999, a China-based business-to-business marketplace site which currently serves more than 79 million members from more than 240 countries and territories. In September 2014 it was announced Alibaba was raising $20 billion in an IPO. Ma now serves as Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, which is a holding company with nine major subsidiaries –Alibaba.com, Tmall, Taobao(just like eBay in US), eTao, Marketplace, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan, 1688.com, AliExpress.com and Alipay(which is the early competitor of Paypal and now serves the same way amongst China).

Now as the richest man, Ma said to journalist, that he lived a happier life when he earns 90rmb a month and struggled in society than being the richest one, which of course we never believe. Why telling all this? Simply because I think Jack Ma has a story worth telling, and as a business symbol of China, Ma becomes a new star that guide Chinese entrepreneurs to head his way.

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Since day1 I get to Industrial Engineering 2 years ago, I heard this words over and over again. ‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.’ And also, IE is nearly all about optimization and simplification. I cannot quite understand it clearly from the beginning, but later on as my major courses go further, I have a better understanding 😛

Elevator Pitch last week let me think of this again. Yep, if you can not even go over the venture in 60 seconds, how can you do it well enough? Simply ( but comprehensive ) explanation means you have a deep understanding and mature plan for it, which suggests that you can develop well later on.

That’s just a little don’t-want-to-get-up thought in bed 😛  All advice is welcome ~

By accident I attended a workshop meeting tonight held by a meetup group ‘Toastmaster’. I’m still confused what exactly is this group about but did have a great time then. The main purpose is to offer people who want to improve their speaking skills the chance and guidance they need. 10-20 people meet together, each give a short speech on arbitrary topics and evaluate each other’s performance.

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I was like a dog sneaking into cats’ get-together but still enjoyed it a lot. For me it’s not like a speaking training class but more of listening to others’s thoughts and experiences. I could just focus on what they talked about rather than how they performed the speech.

There are 3 speaker tonight to give a short speech.First one is Elena Vernigora, a Swedish lady with a likeness of Princess Kate. Her title is ‘Where Buda and Pest meet…’ , and she talked about her experience of a week in Budapest and around. She was planning to spend one-week holiday in Milan for shopping, but by accident she ran into Budapest, a city not that famous for tourism. But instead of complaining and desperation,she had a great time exploring this mysterious city and fell in love with it. That’s her story where Buda and Pest meet, life is like that, full of surprise for you to find out.

The second speaker is Elena Fadeeva, she talks about water–the BLUE GOLD. She put emphasis on the importance of water and worldwide use of it. She points out that water is the base of agriculture and without water there’s not food, no life at all. So shouldn’t we treat water the same way as gold? I think it’s quite old stuff and well-know fact, so didn’t pay much attention.

The last and most amazing speech is given by the president of Toastmaster, Antoinette Olander. She is a passionate and friendly woman. Her title is ‘What Have We Done?’ She enumerates the historical events happened in her generation( the boomers, as she puts it).15 years from high school graduation, some become entrepreneurs and bosses, some are employers and some are employees, some went to Vietnam and some become widows. Some marched with Martin Luther King and some died with the twin building in NY… but all these just make her stronger and give her tools to make it in this world: respect to others, self-discipline and not to be judgmental. In the end, she quoted the lyrics of the famous song ‘Forever Young’ to end the speech and we all felt passionate and confident.

Here is what I want to share with you 🙂

 

May God bless and keep you always 
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others 
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars 
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young 
May you stay forever young.May you grow up to be righteous 
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth 
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous 
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young 
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy 
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation 
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful 
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young 
May you stay forever young.

 

Tonight I went to the event about Business Freedom and had a quite enjoyable time there. Earlier I though that it may be some speech on what is business freedom and something like your business freedom should never against national interests and there is no absolute freedom and whatever… But it turned out that it’s nothing like that and Eric is quite a humorous mentor and entrepreneur. He wants to bring energy to us and make some change in our life.

It took him a long time to realize his love for speaking of business in public.And he told many useful tools and quite a lot knowledge which is a great help to people who is going to start or is running business right now.So useful that I wrote 6-paged notes in total.

Below is some from my notes…


How to Define a Successful Entrepreneur: the company runs smoothly with or without the owner physically being around.

Inception Marketing, it’s about making value for people(make them want to buy something) instead of just satisfied what they want. A great metaphor is there is 2 ways to catch a butterfly: one is the net and another is to build a beautiful garden that they will come to you.

Choosing a Coach/Mentor:business background is important! 2 hours is enough to decide if you can sign the contract with him/her. We should hire people for the good result not just for a feeling of certainty.

Making MISTAKE: This is a big part of running business…Making mistakes is useful and necessary for growth. But it’s not simply about making mistakes, it’s to make ORIGINAL mistake, that is, never make the same mistake over and over again.

Big Mistakes: a) do not chase after easy sells like a monkey sticking to the nut. b)sell is like a date, do not only think and talk about yourself. On the contrary, make some connection. c)do not chase the clients, is you are needy they will run away.

Attraction: Same as the butterfly metaphor, success is far less of what you chase than what you attract. So you should attract your clients and make them come to you.

Standard of Successful Company: People there are strongly passionate and loving being there so much, treating work like their life.

Telling Story: Everyone likes to hear stories. So why not make your business sound like a story especially in a conversation?

DO WHAT YOU LOVE!

HOLD TIGHT if you are truly good!

Protect the trademark & chase after the BRIDE!


 

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Other thing like ITM and inceptive story, Leon has put in his post in deail so I’d not repeat 😛 I had a great time there and will be so happy if you can also learn something from this post!

 

Like Bill Gates, Kai-Fu Lee is really famous among Chinese and he’s the first name of entrepreneur jumping in my mind when I take this class.

Kai-Fu Lee is a Taiwanese and living in Beijing now, (BUT has immigrated to USA long time ago 🙁 ) What made him famous is his contribution to Microsoft and then Google, rising from a research computer scientist of Carnegie Mellon University to Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Corp. and end as Google’s vice president. Kai-Fu Lee has a very innovative and creative mind, and his college credited him with “helping dramatically to im­prove the quality and range of services that we offer in China, and ensuring that we continue to innovate on the Web for the benefit of users and advertisers. “

But the reason why I have such a deep impression of him is from Weibo(just like twitter in China), where he has more than 30 million followers including me. He likes to post creative ideas and some knowledge of building and managing a company and I benefit a lot from them. He is a writer as well, his book MAKING A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE was once the bestseller. 

But in 2013 he was diagnosed lymph cancer in his 40s. Besides the tough mind he shows, he also talks more about the normal but happy life with his family and the true happiness his lovely daughter gives him. Besides, he also shares many great ideas about how to release work pressure and how to form a healthy lifestyle. He says everyone should care more about family before it’s too late, and a open mind is the key to happiness.

Here’s his weibo if you can read Chinese:P

http://www.weibo.com/kaifulee

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Kai-Fu Lee will always be my guide in life 🙂