Jack Ma is the reason I hate Frederick Taylor so much. Taylor was the pioneer of scientific management, or the idea of "man as machine". So obsessed was he with efficiency that he invented the slip-on shoe to save seconds. Modern managers have taken Taylor to its logical end and expect men to perform exactly the way a machine would. What guys like Ma fail to realize is that people don't give the same effort on hour 10 that they do on hour 3, or that people get sick, make mistakes, have disagreements, etc., natural human conditions that are directly opposed to the very idea of scientific management.

Like all bad ideologies, we'll cling tightly to it until it fails, then wonder what the hell happened.

Didact,

Jack Ma can say this crap because he was chosen by Xi and the commie party. If he wasn't, his company would've joined the millions of dead Chinese companies

Also, why should I slave away and make him richer? If I put those hours I expect to be rewarded. If not you're just a mugger, a sophtiscated one but still a mugger,

Yeah. "You're not a team player" – possibly the five stupidest words ever to come out of any corporate middle manager's mouth. The reality is that most of the serious work gets done by high-performing individuals and very small teams of highly talented people – not by teams in general. And mashing the accelerator down on an entire organisation is a great way to burn out the best talents while ensuring that the mediocrities simply keep getting in their way. It's a very, very stupid way to run a company – or any other organisation.

This form of business is not sustainable, which anyone with an MBA (like me) can see, but of course my opinions are not wanted because I'm spreading a "negative attitude". And management wonders why most people consider jobs as jails. Actually, those people are being kind. It's much worse than that.

If you convert the "996 scheme" into an engineering stress model for facilities management, it implies that the facilities can't produce sufficient value to warrant their continued operation unless they operate at full capacity without scheduled maintenance or systems downtime.

If you can't put more facilities online in order to be able to schedule maintenance or systems downtime, then your operations become fragile. If you can't imagine how to improve the operations of your faclities, then you can't put improvements and savings into place, which is to say that you can't implement ideas that change the operations for the better.

And so Jack Ma's Alibaba is doomed precisely because it's running all-out, without any slack for adopting new ideas, and as a consequence it acts like a very specific and familiar type of business: a highly labour-extractive business that doesn't depend on ideas or intellectual property capital as much as an easily bullied workforce.

It exists as a sweatshop, in other words, with Jack Ma operating as sweatshop grand manager extraordinaire.

Alibaba only has sufficient value to exist as a going concern as long as it can bully its employees into providing excess value for the company. Alibaba presently operates as a scam that has no real vision for how it can maintain its operations long-term, preferring to wow investors with short-term gains extracted from the employees themselves.

The competition Jack Ma is worried about will solve the systems engineering problems without having to resort to red-lining critical people within these companies, and they can achieve profitability over both the short-term and the long-term with these methods.

Once they've figured this out, they'll be in a good position to shift market dominance to such a point that Alibaba's future viability will consist of its network of suppliers and not much else, at which point Alibaba will be viable only as a stripped asset for sale to a much better organised buyer.

As for the bullied labour force, those red-lined critical people at Alibaba will eventually get jobs with the better organised competition, and the people who are left will not be able to sustain the profitability of the business.

This is not unique to Alibaba: this inevitably happens to bullying employers.

Jack Ma will deny this would ever happen: this also inevitably happens when bullying employers are caught out at being bullying employers, and the best he can hope for is that he can cash out of Alibaba before the flock of black swans arrives.

(The part required by the SEC and the FCA: I don't own any positions in Alibaba or its related concerns, and I'm not offering investment advice.)