Alibaba, the Chinese internet titan that filed for an IPO in the U.S. last week, could be the largest tech IPO in history. But Alibaba doesn’t look much like Facebook, Google, or even Amazon. Instead, it operates more like GE.
Spanning e-commerce, payments, messaging, business software, entertainment, and more, Alibaba looks a lot like a conglomerate. And it sets strategy like one, according to a Harvard Business School case study by professor Julie Wulf. Competition trumps cooperation, and distributed decision-making by individual business units trumps universal strategy.
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To read the original article: Alibaba Looks More Like GE than Google - Walter Frick - Harvard Business Review
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