Post Alley Crackpot – that’s a wicked name, by the way!!! – left a long and very erudite comment on my recent post concerning the “996 ethic” that Chinese businesses “encourage” (read: force upon) their employees to follow:

Jack Ma actually made a huge mistake over the long-term, but as a short-term speculation he may get away with this for a while.

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.

Yep. Every word is true. I can’t really add much to it other than to point out that burnout is inevitable if you don’t give people rest from time to time.

As I said in that post, I lived something close to that lifestyle for about a month, and worked more or less 6 days a week for much of the summer of 2012. I did it because I had no choice; if I had not done it, the businesses that I was supporting would not have been able to generate their risk metrics, and would likely have been shut down by their market risk managers.

There was nothing fun or good about it. The long and brutal hours drove me, and my team, to and sometimes even beyond our individual breaking points.

I was originally hired into that team to replace a guy with serious mental issues – which turned out to be so bad that he ended up taking his own life. He was driven into long-term disability for 6 months because of the mental stress that he was under from his manager at the time, from the extremely high-pressure environment, and from the near-total lack of decent systems and processes that made it impossible for people to get anything done quickly and efficiently.

That guy actually rejoined my team after he came back, and he quickly realised that I was categorically not the kind of dipshit that he was used to dealing with from his previous experiences. And, for a time, he became a solid, productive, capable member of the team – because he saw that things were rapidly improving because of the work that I was putting in to improve the systems, processes, and methods that we used to produce the daily risk and P&L.

I am not relating this to make myself sound good. I sacrificed a lot over that year, and the subsequent years, for a company that really didn’t give a damn about me, and I was a fool to do it. I should have looked out for myself and moved on much earlier and much faster.

The point I am making here is that I was only able to spend all of those hours fixing things because the pace of the work slackened off a bit, and therefore I finally had the time to make improvements.

April 2012 was miserable, for many reasons. I had almost no free time and could hardly spend any time whatsoever in the gym, or with my family when they came over to visit. It was hard, unrelenting, painful work that resulted in near-burnout for me.

But, one of the great things about working in finance is that, from mid-May to about early September, things slow down dramatically.

This is because of a saying in the business: “Sell in May and go away”. Traders and brokers have lives and families too, and during the summers, when kids are out of school and the pace of life slows down a bit as executives and workers spend more time at home enjoying the long lazy summer days, the markets tend to slow down as well.

This meant that our pace of work also slowed down, and we were able to get on with doing actual living for a change.

Or, in my case, with fixing things late at night and on weekends.

And it also allowed me, as the de facto team leader, to do something that nobody in that team had ever done before:

Because we were all young and single at the time, once a month I made sure that the whole team would go out for drinks somewhere nearby. And we would invite along other folks from the product control teams to join us.

Those nights out were essential for team-building, morale, and overall happiness. Barriers came down, friendships were established over drunken boozy nights out, and on one very memorable occasion about a year later, I watched a 220lb genius powerlifter lose a chugging contest to a very hot half-Mexican trading assistant.

These things are all vital for happy, healthy, productive teams. People have to be able to stay loose around each other in the workplace. They have to be able to trust each other. And the best way to build that trust is to get people out of their workplace shells once in a while and give them a chance to escape the pressures of their daily lives, and let their hair down a bit.

This is simply not possible in a 996 culture.

That kind of culture breeds dissatisfaction, burnout, distrust, lackluster performance, and high turnover. It is a downright stupid way of handling workplace pressures and requirements.

As if that isn’t enough to bury the whole idea, check out this latest brainwave from Jack Ma – the 669 Rule:

After advocating people to follow the spirit of “996” (9 am to 9 pm, six days a week at workplace), Alibaba founder Jack Ma now has given another advice for an improved life: Follow the spirit of “669”…

According to a report in Daily Mail, China’s richest man gave this advice to the employees during Alibaba staff’s group wedding in the country.

“At work, we emphasize the spirit of ‘996’. In life, we should follow ‘669,’” Ma said.

The 54-year-old Ma was speaking at his company’s mass wedding which takes place every year on ‘Ali Day’ on May 10 at the company’s headquarters in Hangzhou.

The “996” work philosophy was criticised by the tech industry.

The “669” philosophy has also created a social media storm, with many net users calling it lewd.

“Who on earth would have the energy to do 669 at home after 996 during work?” quipped one user.

“669”, for those who are wondering, means: “Sex for six days, six times, with duration being the key”.

Riiiiiiiight…

I know that Jack Ma was almost certainly joking, but whoever it was that said that no one would have enough energy to do 669 at home after 996 at work, is absolutely right.

I’m all for a man having sex with his wife as often as possible. This is unambiguously a Good Thing. But if people are simply too tired and burned out from working crazy hours, they will not have the energy, patience, mindset, or desire to engage in intercourse, no matter what the benefits are.

Jack Ma’s philosophies of life do not deserve to be taken seriously. You can rev an engine to the redlines for a long time if you have to – but sooner or later, you must let it run down and cool off, and eventually you must repair the damage done to it. The fact that a guy behind a tech company cannot figure this out, tells you everything you need to know about his people management skills.