Zeng Ming: The Brutal Truth, Companies That Will Disappear, Why “Excellent” ≠ “Great”

（English subtitles translated by AI, for reference only.）Hello everyone, I'm Xiaojun

Today's guest is corporate strategy expert Professor Zeng Ming

Professor Zeng is the former Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba Group

He also helped found two business schools

Namely, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB) and Hupan University

But the identity he is better known for

is as someone who has thought and researched deeply about corporate strategy

Many founders and entrepreneurs say they have been inspired by him

As a researcher who has lived through the entire internet cycle

We talked with him about

his complete thinking on the new era and new paradigm of AI

And he drew comparisons with key periods in history

Listening to him gave me a more holistic perspective

So next is my interview with Professor Zeng

Looking forward to 2026, when we progress together with AI

The corporate system of hierarchical management

will decline and die out

But it may no longer be called a company

It definitely won't be called a company

It definitely won't be called a company

So companies will disappear

Companies will die out

There is nothing to regret about that

There will be more fun things in the future

Tell me, how many people

are happy going to work at a company these days?

They're not happy

Let me put it a bit sharply:

For this generation of entrepreneurs

there is a big hurdle to overcome

Because the basic law of economics is

as long as there is homogeneous supply

you cannot earn high profits

You are just a company that isn't worth much

Google won't necessarily be the Google of the next era

Will ByteDance be the ByteDance of the next era?

Likewise, most likely not

ByteDance's models are doing quite well today

At least they're in the first tier in China

No—so ByteDance

has a big chance of becoming an AI cloud company

But that big to-C application

carries enormous uncertainty

You mean Doubao?

Doubao definitely isn't it

Otherwise they would be pouring money in regardless of cost

They stopped because Doubao isn't good enough

Not enough of a future

Will social relationships be restructured?

Is Tencent safe?

They will definitely be restructured

Tencent, supposedly the safest—

why has it been so panicked lately?

Precisely because it might not be safe either

Relationships between people will be restructured

People's social relationships will be restructured

And what about the relationship between people and goods?

That will be restructured too

I think Alibaba faces the same challenge

In the face of this giant wave

which giants are safe?

I've always believed that before a giant wave

no one is safe

Do you think that by going all in on AI

they can still become companies of the next era?

I mean, era-defining companies?

The challenge is enormous

Looking at history

is there any precedent?

Companies from one era transitioning into the next era

and still doing exceptionally well—

are there many?

It's not a question of how many

It's a question of whether there are any at all

Any at all?

Basically none

So this doesn't depend on your strategic choices

No matter what, it's hard to stay at the table

That's the despairing part

That's not despairing at all

People are born, age, get sick, and die

Companies also are born, age, decline, and die

Nothing is more natural than that

That's why new companies get their chance

That's why young people can have dreams

Professor Zeng, I've heard many entrepreneurs mention you

They say a very important strategic transformation they made

They say a very important strategic transformation they made

may have come from taking your class at Hupan University

There are many business school professors

I wonder why so many entrepreneurs say they've been influenced by you

What do you think makes you different from other business school professors?

First of all, I think I was extremely lucky

I had the opportunity to join Alibaba when the internet was growing fastest

And I took part in a phase of hypergrowth for a company

So that experience

combined with my solid academic training

allowed me to integrate theory with practice

Because while I was doing the work, I often thought about

which of the things I used to teach could actually be applied

And in the process I would also distill

what new things

could be turned into a theoretical framework

that could still be used in the future

So combining theory and practice was a major breakthrough

And second, I have continuously studied frontier industry development

So when I talk with entrepreneurs

besides discussing strategic methodology with them

I can also explore with them

how the industry will actually develop next

and what kind of strategic decisions might be more appropriate

So combining these two is a fairly rare capability

Take Alibaba as an example

Because this is the company you were personally involved with the longest

Because this is the company you were personally involved with the longest

Because this is the company you were personally involved with the longest

Over the past 20 years, were there strategic decisions that truly determined Alibaba's survival?

Which ones would they be?

I happen to be doing a retrospective lately

So I'm quite familiar with Alibaba's first 15 years

Because I participated in it fully

In fact, the most important decisions were probably three

Founding Taobao

Founding Alipay

Founding Alibaba Cloud

And these three decisions were not only unrecognized by society at the time

The controversy inside the company was also extremely intense

People may already know a lot about the controversy over Alibaba Cloud

But when Taobao announced its founding

several executives were very strongly opposed

Why?

They felt Alibaba's original business hadn't matured yet

And then you went to attack eBay's core main business

And then you went to attack eBay's core main business

The risk was too great

So these are the three most important decisions

Then there were the slightly less important ones

Like how Taobao went from a platform for buying and selling goods

to becoming an ecosystem supporting the development of e-commerce

And then how to go all in on mobile

I think these two decisions were actually very important too

But perhaps not as significant

But as I just said, I should add one more point

After you make a strategy

there are still layer upon layer of decisions

Secondary strategic decisions are also very important

For example, in Alibaba Cloud's early days

do you serve only one scenario

or should the architecture support multiple service scenarios from the start?

Should the scenario you serve be Taobao or search?

And open source or closed source?

These were all second-level strategic questions with huge debate

And further down, your database changed

Should you build your own database?

Then computing also changed

And storage changed too

That's how the slogan "de-IOE" came about back then

That is, replacing IBM, Oracle, and EMC (storage)

So just like today, once computing is solved

you find storage becomes the new bottleneck

So in the process from strategy to execution

there are many very important decisions

The further down you go, the more strategy and tactics

are tightly intertwined

So making one big strategic decision isn't enough

From decision to execution to finally seeing results

there is an enormous challenge

At the moment of making a strategic decision

how did you know it was a good strategy?

Because there was so much controversy at the time

Generally, because you make many strategies

how do you judge that it is a good strategy?

We didn't know

Because we believed, we saw it

All the truly great companies that became era-defining

were eventually proven right in their contrarian view

Mm

Of course, in the process there were also many crazy ideas

that simply disappeared

This point must be emphasized

It's not crazy ideas

What we see is the so-called survival bias

You are seeing the bias of the winners

The most successful companies are necessarily contrarian

But being contrarian doesn't guarantee success

But at the time

based on our own capabilities

what we could see and were willing to believe in

was that picture

So strategy, to a large extent

is actually about how to create the future

It's not simply a plan

Can only contrarian strategies achieve great success?

Can a consensus strategy achieve great success?

I'm in a consensus track

But I do it better than everyone else

Can that achieve great success?

That's excellence

That's excellence

Not greatness