Adaptation, Innovation and Resilience at Alibaba. A Discussion with BCG's Martin Reeves. (2 of 3) (48)

Sep 20, 2020

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This is Part 2 in a three part series about Alibaba and Ant Group. The focus was on Alibaba's ability to continually adapt to new markets, consumer behaviors, technologies and opportunities. The idea of adaptability and innovation are increasingly discussed as key competitive abilities. Part 1 is here.

To investigate that, I spoke with Martin Reeves, who is Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute. And has long written about adaptability and rate of learning as critical parts of strategy. Here is his summary from the BCG website:

"Since joining BCG in 1989, Martin has led a broad range of strategy assignments in the Financial Institutions, Consumer Goods, Industrial Goods and Health Care sectors. He has particular expertise in the areas of adaptive strategy, strategy for multi-business systems, sustainability strategies, ecosystem strategies, collective learning and innovation, corporate vitality, and trust."

Specifically, we spoke about his paper with Ming Zeng about Alibaba as a self-tuning enterprise. Although we did go off to other ideas pretty quickly. The main question was how Alibaba had been so successful for two decades in business after business.

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Related podcasts and articles:

This is part of Learning Goals: Level 8, with a focus on:

#32: Adaptation and Resilience

Concepts for this class.

Adaptation and Resilience
SMILE Marathon: Sustained Innovation

Companies for this class:

Ant Financial / Alipay / Ant Group
Alibaba

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