Customers first, employees second, and shareholders third.
Interpretation
Prioritizing customers and employees leads to a better business outcome than simply focusing on profits for shareholders.
Jack Ma's quote emphasizes the importance of placing customers and employees at the forefront of business priorities. By nurturing customer satisfaction and employee well-being, a company can foster loyalty and productivity, which ultimately benefits shareholders in the long run, making them the third priority in this framework.
In practice
During a conference on corporate responsibility, this quote can be used to highlight a company's commitment to ethical practices.
Hong Kong people say Hong Kong needs to preserve its uniqueness. I say Hong Kong's uniqueness is in its diversity, its tolerance of difference cultures... China does not want to see Hong Kong in decline. I have full confidence in its future.
If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat tons of them.
It's not that other countries steal jobs from you guys. It's your strategy. Distribute the money and things in a proper way.
Helping doing business easier, we choose the name Alibaba because it is a global company. It is founded in China, but it was created for the world.
In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'
Even if your competitor is still small in size or weak, you should take him seriously and treat him as a giant. Likewise, even if your competitor is massive in size, you shouldn't regard yourself as a weakling.
I don't think a true company - one that builds sustainable value - can ever only exist online or remotely.
Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.
Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.
The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariable does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.
When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.
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