http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9LM6GR02.htm
BEIJING
The U.S. government has labeled China’s top search engine, Baidu, and a leading e-commerce outlet “notorious markets” linked to sales of pirated and fake goods.
Getting emails from people. Will be sending PPTs out on Wed around noon. If you send me emails, please include your name and which classes of mine you are in.
Posted in China entry
We’ll be spending a lot of time on Point of View (POV) and target audience for the next few weeks. It will be useful to have a solid grounding in the basics of organizational charts, or Org Charts.
In the West, these have always been public or semi-public and as clear as possible.
Traditional Chinese enterprises treat this information as more sensitive, and tend to favor more complex structures.
Resources:
Org Charts & resources
http://www.orgchart.net/wiki/Main_Page
==============
Top 5 Reasons to Use an Org Chart
In today’s economy, most organizations spend thousands, if not millions, of dollars on solutions that track critical business assets – ERP applications to track financial data, CRM applications to track customers and network management solutions to track critical network devices. While these assets are important, they do not facilitate tracking or managing the most important asset in every organization — the company’s workforce. The lack of visibility organizations have in managing their workforce organizational structure negatively impacts their financial performance every day.
Regardless of what you call it — organizational chart or organigramme, an automated org chart tool should be the basis for all of your workforce initiatives. Here are the top 5 reasons why using automated organizational charts will improve human resource management and add value to any organization.
1. Instantly Access an Accurate View of Your Organizational Structure
Automated organizational charts go well beyond simple graphics by leveraging HR and ERP data located in a wide range of sources, such as comma-delimited text files, ODBC-compliant databases, LDAP-compliant directory servers or XML data sources. Instant access to your up-to-date organizational structure enables your company to:
By visualizing the entire structure of your workforce, data and structural inaccuracies can be quickly resolved and operational efficiency can be improved on a proactive basis.
2. Improve Communication from Top to Bottom
With organizational charts, senior executives, middle managers and human resource professionals have instant visuals of:
Every employee can also view organizational data, such as employee contact information through a standard web browser. By providing organizational knowledge, employees can immediately improve communication throughout the company.
3. Align Your Corporate Strategy with the Optimal Organizational Structure
With org charts you can conduct strategic “organizational modeling” planning scenarios that will help you determine the optimal structure for your business today and in the future.
Are you considering a merger or acquisition and want to see where the two companies have duplicate resources?
Do you need to know how realigning different departments can impact your bottom line?
With automated organizational charts and “organizational modeling” planning, the economic impact of these scenarios on your business will be easy to predict. An automated organizational chart enables your company to quickly adapt to ever-changing business requirements and market conditions.
4. Maintain Compliance with Government, Industry and Company Regulations
Compliance regulations demand that companies document accurate reporting structures, employee access privileges, the roles individuals play in critical business processes, and more. Organizations mitigate risk by validating compliance with government, industry and corporate regulations using accurate, enterprise-wide organizational charts. With automated organizational charts you can maintain accurate, enterprise-wide workforce compliance documentation and conduct compliance audits on a consistent basis.
5. Improve and Maintain Workforce Data Integrity across the Organization
Maintaining accurate workforce data is difficult when:
These challenges combined with the fact that critical workforce information is spread out in a wide-range of places (HR, ERP, Information Systems, or spreadsheets), maintaining accurate organizational data can be next to impossible. Automated organizational charts can capture and visualize data from any source, provide the entire organization with a visual representation of reporting relationships and allow managers or team members to modify information under their span of control.
The detailed workforce data you need exists today. You simply require an org charting solution that can help you put it to work. Ready for an automated org chart solution? Download an organizational chart software solution now to create professional org charts in minutes.
=================
http://www.nyu.edu/financial.services/cdv/pdf/payroll_orgchart.pdf
Posted in Assignments, IR, On the Final, Presentation, Required
Tagged org chart, organizational chart
If you haven’t been following the Alibaba resignation scandal, get on it. We’ll be looking at how it’s viewed in China vs. the take in the US. Resources are scattered around our site, but let’s make researching this event part of the project.
Who is involved?
What are the issues?
Why are people still talking about this case?
Posted in Assignments, cases, On the Final, Online skills, Presentation, Required
People’s Daily: http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90780/91345/7298735.html
The combination of globalization and the digital age have severely magnified the power of information. How to respond effectively to this smorgasbord of information will test the long-term stability of emerging countries.
As the West is upstream of the world’s information flow, if the emerging countries in the low-lying areas cannot handle the information “drought” properly, they will be overwhelmed by the flow from the West.
An important symbol of the “lying low” phenomenon is the lack of confidence among emerging countries in their own self-taught values. The mode of information production in emerging countries merely imitates that of Western society, thus weakening information exchange. It is hard for emerging countries to follow their own way to set their own national political process.
History will judge the information pressure faced by emerging countries, and determine whether such pressure was positive, negative, or both.
For China, the potential of information independence is far stronger than for other emerging countries, but the pressure on China is also clear. There is no need for China to completely remove such pressure, but it should have a strong capability to defend against “information flooding.”
China should remove itself from the downstream of information flow. This has the same bearing on national security as the development of national defense forces. With China’s increasing power, it will become increasingly impractical to challenge China with military forces, but the possibility of upsetting China with information is significant.
The enhancement of information independence is not only to reduce the deficit of external information exchange. The whole process of information production in China should also steer clear of the traps set by Western values.
The process of creating negative information has been introduced from the West and has taken root. However, Chinese society is much weaker in tolerating this negative information.
We should not try to push back this negative information, as it would be impossible to do so. But if we can learn how to balance negative information, an important security hole of China can be gradually filled.
Source: Global Times
This page will serve as a bulletin board for current stories on the Alibaba resignation case.:
=============
Financial fallout from the scandal:
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20110224000127&cid=1102&MainCatID=0
================
The People’s Daily tells the story of Alipocalypse — in a series of meaningful photos:
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90778/90860/7298700.html
============]
From ChinaLawBlog:
http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/02/alibabaisnotyourchinaanswer.html
Posted by Dan on February 23, 2011
More than three years ago, I did a post, entitled, “I Hate Alibaba (The Website, Not The Company),” voicing my concerns with foreign companies thinking that they were safe sourcing through Alibaba. My concern at that time stemmed from the fact that many of the calls my office was getting regarding really bad or never delivered product were coming from people who had sourced through Alibaba.
==================
From ChinaEconomicReview;
Alibaba: China’s sourcing trailblazer reaches a turning point Thursday, February 24, 2011 – 08:35
=====================
The resignations of David Wei and Elvis Lee, announced after the close of trading in Hong Kong today, were clearly intended to signal that the company — and especially its founder and leader, Ma — is serious about addressing any hint of fraud. Wei is being replaced by unlisted sister company Taobao’s CEO Jonathan Lu, who will hold both jobs. Inits statement posted to the Hong Kong stock exchange, Alibaba.com said that 2,326 of the company’s “Gold Suppliers” in 2009 and 2010 had defrauded buyers, and that the average value of each fraud claim was less than $1,200. The company separately said that it had paid out a total of $1.7 million to fraud claimants out of a “Fair Play” fund established from the membership fees of fraudulent suppliers.
The numbers are small compared to the business done on Alibaba.com — the fraudulent sellers that were discovered add up to less than 2% of the company’s more than 100,000 Gold Suppliers, and the board says the fraud had “not had a material financial impact on our Company.” But it is clear that what irked founding Chairman Ma is that some of his employees — nearly 100 — apparently abetted the fraud and others didn’t act quickly enough to stop it.
The company’s official statement said that Wei and Lee were not involved in the fraudulent activity, and that ”management made good faith efforts to address the problem,” but the board “accepted Mr. Wei and Mr. Lee’s wish that they take responsibility for the systemic break-down in our Company’s culture of integrity.”
Ma conveyed his sentiments more directly in a letter to the company’s employees today. “Over this past month, I’ve experienced a lot of torment, a lot of frustration, a lot of anger,” Ma writes in the letter, which I’ve obtained from an employee of the company. “This is the pain we suffer as we develop, the price that we pay as part of our growth, and it hurts!” Ma then issues a general call to arms on corporate values that concludes, “If not now? When? If not me? Who?” I have pasted the letter in full below.
It is unclear how this news will affect the overall group, in which Yahoo holds a 40% stake, much to the consternation of Ma, who would like to buy back the stake. The billionaire had told employees in an email last month that two unlisted subsidiaries, China’s largest online marketplace Taobao and the nation’s largest online payment platform Alipay, are not ready to IPO.
Taobao, which destroyed eBay in the competition for China’s fast-growing e-commerce market, would clearly command a significant multi-billion dollar valuation from investors were shares to be offered. Alibaba.com, meanwhile, dropped 3.47% in Hong Kong Monday before the announcement, after a strong run-up of 10.5% since Feb. 10. Its market capitalization stands at $10.8 billion.
See the statement from Alibaba.com’s board here, and a report by the company’s in-house information service Alizila here. Below is the text of Ma’s letter to the employees of Alibaba, or “Aliren,” first in the English translation, followed by the original Chinese:
Fellow Aliren:
As we have announced today, the B2B board of directors has accepted the resignations of B2B CEO David Wei and COO Elvis Lee. Additionally, former senior VP of B2B HR Kangming Deng has resigned his post as Chief People Officer of Alibaba Group in acceptance of responsibility and will be demoted to a different post.
Several months ago, we discovered that some of our B2B China Gold Supplier (CGS) members were suspected of fraudulent activity. What made it shocking was evidence indicating that certain members of the CGS sales team knowingly allowed, or in some cases even helped, these fraudulent companies join the Alibaba.com marketplace.
We formed a special task force to investigate the situation. According to the preliminary results of a month-long inquiry, we found 1219 CGS (1.1% of all Gold Suppliers) who joined in 2009 and 1107 CGS (0.8% of Gold Suppliers) who joined in 2010 were engaged in fraudulent activity. These fraudsters had joined the Alibaba.com marketplace for the sole purpose of exploiting the platform that we’ve labored to build up over the past 12 years to defraud overseas buyers. At the same time, the investigation confirmed that nearly 100 CGS sales staff knowingly allowed fraudsters to become CGS members so that they could “make their numbers” and receive commission income.
Any tolerance of this type of affront to business ethics and company values is a crime against the rest of our customers and Aliren who remain honest. We must take measures to safeguard the values of Alibaba! All the colleagues who were directly or indirectly involved must be held responsible; more importantly, B2B’s management team must assume primary responsibility. We have already terminated the storefronts of all 2326 CGS members suspected of fraud, and we have asked law enforcement authorities to assist us in our investigation.
Since the day that Alibaba was established, pursuit of profit has never been our main goal. We have no interest in turning the company into a mere money-making machine. Rather, we have long held firm to our mission of “making it easy to do business anywhere”. When we say “customer first”, we mean that we’d rather sacrifice growth than do anything that would jeopardize our customers’ interests, much less be a part of any blatant fraud.
Over this past month, I’ve experienced a lot of torment, a lot of frustration, a lot of anger……..
This is the pain we suffer as we develop, a price that we pay as part of our growth, and it hurts! But we have no choice. It is not possible for us to be mistake-free; we may from time to time commit errors of judgment, but we will absolutely not err by compromising our principles. If we do not face up to reality and find the courage to take painful action, Alibaba will no longer be Alibaba and our pursuit of our 102-year dream and mission will become nothing but a joke!
This world does not need another Internet company, much less another company that can make money;
What this world needs is a company that is more open, more transparent, more sharing, more responsible, more global;
What this world needs is a company that is grounded in society, serves the interests of society, and accepts the responsibilities of society;
What this world needs is a culture, a soul, a belief and an acceptance of obligation. Because these are the only things that will allow us to go further, do better, act with confidence on the challenging path of entrepreneurship.
What comforted me is learning that the overwhelming majority of our CGS sales colleagues upheld their principles in the face of temptation. To these colleagues, I salute you! More importantly, we thank the colleagues who have the courage to stand firm and fight against what is wrong. From their actions we witnessed the courage and power of upholding integrity and principles. In them we see Alibaba’s future and hope! And we need more Aliren like them! Those who do the extraordinary must assume extraordinary responsibilities!
The resignations of David and Elvis are tremendous losses to the company. For me this is extremely sad and hurtful. But I think their willingness as Aliren to step up and accept responsibility is most admirable. On behalf of the company, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the both of them for their unrelenting dedication and contribution to the company.
Fellow Aliren, the B2B board of directors has appointed Jonathan Lu as B2B CEO; the Group has appointed Lucy Peng as Chief People Officer of Alibaba Group. I hope everyone will fully support the work that lies ahead and believe we can make a difference!
This is an era full of promises and an era that no one wants to miss out on. Only through holding onto our ideals and our principles will we be able to become the pride of this era!
If not now? When?
If not me? Who?
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/incoming-alibabacom-ceo-lu-wins-praise-2011-02-22
Feb. 22, 2011, 7:16 a.m. EST Incoming Alibaba.com CEO Lu wins praise By Chris Oliver, MarketWatch HONG KONG (MarketWatch) —
Alibaba.com won approval from analysts on Tuesday who said the selection of a 41-year-old with more than a decade of experience could help the company rebound from a damaging sales-fraud scandal. Alibaba.com said in a statement Monday it had appointed Jonathan Lu, chief executive of Taobao — an unlisted sister unit — to succeed David Wei, who is leaving the company to take responsibility for shortcomings after sellers committed fraud on the e-commerce site by posing as legitimate shopkeepers.
Here’s how it works. Lu’s appointment will help distance the company from the doomed strategy — unveiled in the wake of the global economic downturn in 2008 — of using lower subscription fees to attract online shopkeepers to its trading platform, J.P.Morgan said. Changes dating from that period helped set in motion events that led to more than 2,300 fraudulent online shopkeepers, as uncovered by an internal company investigation that was disclosed Monday. “The situation also reminds us of Baidu’s lack on internal controls over [its] sales force back in 2008. Baidu eventually put proper checks and balances in place and continues to enjoy solid growth,” J.P. Morgan analysts said in a note Tuesday. Baidu in 2008 allegedly accepted payments to tailor its web searches for commercial purchases.
Alibaba.com’s (THE:HK:1688) (PINK:ALBIY) shares ended 8.6% lower in Hong Kong on Tuesday, adding to the more than 3% drop Monday.
Alibaba.com said in a conference call with analysts on Monday some of the fraud cases appear related to salesmen who signed off on dubious accounts in order to meet their monthly sales targets. Changes to the salesmen’s commission structure were part of a strategy switch in 2008 overseen by Wei in the wake of the global financial crisis. The allegedly fraudulent online shops that appeared on Alibaba.com were set up 2009 and 2010. Some of the incidents are believed to have involved the sale of consumer electronics at attractive prices and low minimum-order requirements. Alibaba.com said it has closed down all the shopfronts in question and will operate a fraud-detection model as part of more robust security measures. Wei, along with Chief Operating Officer Elvis Lee, both resigned on Monday to take responsibility for the “systemic breakdown in our company’s culture of integrity,” Alibaba.com said. It’s believed some of the problem shopfronts were set up with the help of Alibaba.com sales staff who assisted in getting around the website’s verification checks. Neither Wei nor Lee were linked to activities that led to buyer complaints.
Standard Chartered said in note on Tuesday that Lu’s appointment could eventually lead to Taobao’s assets being gifted to Alibaba.com as a part of strategy to tap synergies between the companies’ various units. J.P. Morgan and Standard Chartered both have a 16 Hong Kong dollar ($2.05) target price on Alibaba.com’s shares. J.P.Morgan says it has a neutral outlook on the company but advises investors to buy the shares on a significant pullback in prices. Standard Chartered said in note on Tuesday that Lu’s appointment could eventually lead to Taobao’s assets being gifted to Alibaba.com as a part of strategy to tap synergies between the companies’ various units. J.P. Morgan and Standard Chartered both have a 16 Hong Kong dollar ($2.05) target price on Alibaba.com’s shares. J.P.Morgan says it has a neutral outlook on the company but advises investors to buy the shares on a significant pullback in prices.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/alibaba/
From Techcrunch:
Alibaba.com CEO And COO Out Because Of Vendor Fraud
Alibaba.com CEO David Wei and COO Elvis Lee have resigned this morning after an internal probe found that more than 2000 sellers on the e-commerce site were committing fraud, in some cases to the knowledge of Alibaba staff. The Hanzhou, China-based Alibaba told the WSJ that more than 100 sales staff (out of 5,000) were allowing fraudulent suppliers to fake the business registration papers needed to set up shop on the site. In some cases buyers never received items already paid for.
To Alibaba’s credit, it embarked upon the internal investigations in order to preserve customer trust after one of its employees tipped the board off on suspicious activity. The average value of the fraud claims was $1,200 and Alibaba says that buyers who experienced fraud might be eligible for a “good-faith” payment.
While Wei and Lee were not personally involved in the activities that led to buyer complaints, they left their posts in order to take responsibility for the “systematic breakdown” at the site. Jonathan Lu, who runs the Alibaba Group-owned partner site Taobao.com has been named as a replacement.
Yahoo owns about 40% of the Alibaba Group, which doesn’t expect it’s financial results to change because of the management issues. One of the most rapidly growing e-commerce sites in China, Alibaba.com’s third quarter net profit rose 55% to $366.1 million yuan ($55.7 million) in 2010. Alibaba.com shares fell 3.5% today to $16.68 yaun ($2.54) a share before the announcement.
Just a short post to wrap up my week of guest blogging, which, now that I think about it, comes full circle to the broad theme of “soft power” with which I began this week (and one of Jim’s favorite issues as well). It is just a fascinating topic to which I will return again, among many other things, over at my regular Atlantic blog spot.
First, US higher education is still the best, especially if you want an internship in China. So says the China Development Bank, whose summer internship recruitment page defines the scope of education pedigree as limited to ONLY Harvard and MIT. Sorry Yale and Princeton, or Beijing University and Tsinghua, the CDB thinks you’re not internship material for a Chinese state-owned policy bank. To be fair, the CDB is supposedly one of the best-run banks in China under the helm of the princeling Chen Yuan (he is the son of Chen Yun, one of the “eight immortals” in Chinese politics who fought alongside Mao Zedong). According to the FT, the CDB lent more money in the last few years to developing countries than the World Bank. The political implications of the CDB vs. the WB is an entirely different topic that deserves some thought in the future.
So a Chinese state policy bank is actively recruiting from elite American institutions, while passing on China’s own elite institutions. No wonder presidential heir apparent Xi Jinping is also sending his daughter to Harvard. And another political star and princeling Bo Xilai, party secretary of Chongqing, has sent his son Bo Guagua to study at Oxford. The message from the future president of China seems to be a vote of no confidence in China’s own higher education. If you were a Chinese parent with college-aged children, how are you to interpret these messages from your leaders?
I’ll end with an issue I’ve raised before about the natural contrast between US presidents and Chinese presidents based on optics and imagery alone. At the time, I wrote this:
Netizens made an enormous deal out of the fact that Obama exited Air Force One on a rainy night with no entourage and no one holding an umbrella over him. This led to mockery that had it been even a mid-level Chinese official, he would’ve had a dozen people hold umbrellas for him [which implies "look at how unpretentious and equal America is...even their president travels solo in the rain!].
Well, this is what I mean:
As you can see, the Chinese blogosphere has juxtaposed yet another photo of some unknown Chinese official against Obama shaking hands with supporters in the rain. Like I said, Obama doesn’t even have to try to project “soft power”.
By the way, both of these items are courtesy of the Ministry of Tofu, a new Chinese blog in English that I’ve mentioned before.
With that, I’m officially signing off my week-long guest appearance. And thank you Jim for the opportunity. It has been great and enlightening to have been in the company of such a diverse and interesting range of people, features, and views.
Damien Ma is a China analyst at Eurasia Group.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/02/internship-at-a-chinese-bank-only-if-you-go-to-harvard-or-mit/71491/
SmartChinaTeam.com PR Newswire