A week ago, JD.COM released the unaudited performance report for Q4 2016 and the whole year, in which JD.COM turned losses into profits with a net profit of 1 billion yuan. As soon as the financial report came out, that is, "JD.COM finally trudged out of the mire and entered the profit harvest period", but it also said: "Profit is an illusion created by JD.COM through accounting operations" (JD.COM’s 1 billion profit is calculated according to the No-GAAP caliber, and it is not included in the items that do not involve cash expenditure, such as equity incentives and amortization of intangible assets).
Some people shouted and some people were indifferent.
Whether it is appreciated or opposed, there is no dispute that JD.COM is indeed taking off the hat of loss, and it has taken ten years (counting from the first round of financing in 2007) to prove the correctness of such heavy modes as self-operated e-commerce and self-built logistics.
A reporter asked Liu Qiangdong why JD.COM could do it. Liu Qiangdong’s answer is "team". Perhaps the answer is too high-sounding, and the onlookers will disperse after hearing it. However, last year, with the emergence of Shen Haoyu, Xiong Qingyun and others, people realized that in the past ten years, the "direct" Guan Peisheng team that JD.COM began to cultivate in 2007 really provoked the girder; Before they officially took the stage, JD.COM also tried to find and use the talent ideas of "foreign" executives with multinational company background. During the ten years in JD.COM, the strength of local and foreign talents has changed. "Zhang Pei" people
Looking back at the development process of JD.COM, Hu Wei believes that the management team in Liu Qiangdong has gone through four stages: before 2007, it was the stage of the grass-roots team, and Liu Qiangdong made a statement; From 2007 to 2011, local veterans followed Liu Qiangdong to fight the world; From 2012 to 2015, professional managers of foreign companies took the right to speak; After 2016, veterans returned to power, and Guan Peisheng and other direct executives rose.
Observing the alternation of internal power in JD.COM, we can see the change of Liu Qiangdong’s concept of employing people at different stages.
Veteran and Guan Peisheng
The year 2007 was a turning point in JD.COM. That year, JD.COM got the first financing and entered the fast lane of development. At that time, Xin Xu, the investor of today’s Capital, gave Liu Qiangdong two suggestions: one was to introduce some talented people, and the other was to recruit Guan Peisheng.
Unlike earlier Internet companies such as Netease and Sohu, talented students from Tsinghua of Peking University gathered. JD.COM started selling CDs in Zhongguancun. Except for Liu Qiangdong, who graduated from the National People’s Congress, other early employees generally lacked academic qualifications and professional level. Xin Xu’s proposal, on the one hand, aims to fill the management in JD.COM, and on the other hand, to cultivate middle-level talents in JD.COM from scratch.
In April 2007, Chen Shengqiang (now CEO of Jingdong Finance) joined JD.COM and was in charge of finance. At that time, JD.COM didn’t even have an accountant. After we invested, we said we had to help you find an accountant. He replied that it was ok, but the salary could not be higher than that of the old employees. At that time, the highest salary of old employees in JD.COM was 10,000 yuan per month. I’ve been looking for it, and the better chief financial officer wants a monthly salary of 20 thousand yuan. Later, I found a CFO, and I paid half of my salary and half of my salary in JD.COM. The new CFO has been employed for two months. Liu Qiangdong told me that a person with 20,000 yuan is really better than a person with 5,000 yuan. Then you can find someone for me. " Chen Shengqiang was recommended to Liu Qiangdong by Xin Xu.
Then, Xin Xu pushed Xu Lei, who worked in Haoye Advertising Network at that time, to Liu Qiangdong to be a marketing consultant for JD.COM. After that, Liu Qiangdong hired Yan Xiaoqing, his former boss, to take charge of operations and logistics (Yan was once the second-in-command of JD.COM), and Li Daxue, CTO of Tianji.com, became the technical director (resigned).
At this time, Liu Qiangdong preferred "local" executives. No matter Chen Shengqiang, Xu Lei and Li Daxue, or Liu Shuang (who joined in 2009 and served as the assistant to the president of JD.COM and left) and Wang Zhenhui (who joined JD.COM in April 2010 and is now the senior vice president of JD.COM and the head of the operation system of JD.com), most of them have no experience of studying abroad and have been staying in local Chinese enterprises. This is very different from Ma Yun’s practice of bringing Cai Chongxin when he founded Alibaba.
At this point, JD.COM swept away the previous model of small workshops and began to have the prototype of the regular army.
These foreign executives have drastically upgraded the department planning, basic system and information system in JD.COM, which has boosted the rapid growth of JD.COM since 2007.
Because JD.COM’s initial team was too grassroots, and most of the positions were added in the development process, the first round of executive airborne did not cause too much conflict between the old and the new. The executives who entered this period can be regarded as the old management who started their business with Liu Qiangdong.
For senior management positions, JD.COM can’t train from scratch, but for middle managers, Liu Qiangdong is determined to use his own people from the beginning.
"70% of middle managers are promoted internally and 30% are recruited externally." Liu Qiangdong once put forward this goal. In the first session, Liu Qiangdong recruited 2 Guan Peisheng, 8 in the second session, and expanded to nearly 100 in the fifth session. These students will undergo a month-long training, and senior executives including Liu Qiangdong will attend classes in person. Then, after a three-month intensive rotation and a three-month special rotation, the work officially started.
These Guan Peisheng can directly report to Liu Qiangdong himself across the layers of leaders, which is called the fast lane for the youth guards in Liu Qiangdong and the cadres in JD.COM. According to the official data of JD.COM, Guan Peisheng of JD.COM is 4-5 years younger than ordinary employees in the same rank. )
To some extent, when Liu Qiangdong chose Guan Peisheng, he was choosing himself when he was young. "If the family conditions are better and I didn’t suffer much when I was a child, I basically don’t want such people. Comparatively speaking, we hope that Guan Peisheng is a child from an ordinary family or a poor family, and we hope that they are simple, hardworking, willing to contribute their own sweat and skills. " Liu Qiangdong said this when he mentioned Guan Peisheng in his readme.
For a long period of time, local executives+Guan Peisheng became the team match of Liu Qiangdong.
Airborne professional managers
Around 2012, it was another node. Liu Qiangdong said, "In 2012, my most obvious feeling was that many employees were complaining about problems in internal communication and coordination."
This year, in preparation for listing, JD.COM stepped up the layout of management, and the expansion speed of executives reached a peak. At one time, as many as 30 to 40 executives directly reported to Liu Qiangdong. Therefore, Liu Qiangdong tried to build a CXO system, reporting from VP, SVP, CXO and CEO.
Along with this system, a group of top professional managers with bright resumes have filed in. They have the study experience of famous overseas schools and the working background of famous foreign companies, and they have already played a decisive role in the original company, and they have rich experience in international enterprise management.
Shen Haoyu is the first CXO to join. In August 2011, Shen Haoyu joined JD.COM as COO (later CEO of JD.COM Mall). Shen Haoyu’s experience =1992 NPC Finance Department +1997 University of Iowa MBA+ American Express Personal Card Distribution Department Vice President+Sinochem Import & Export+McKinsey +2007 Baidu. He has both foreign investment background and corporate experience in China. Personally, he is also Liu Qiangdong’s senior brother.
After Shen Haoyu joined, he was in charge of customer service, after-sales service, warehousing and other support businesses, as well as regional businesses in South China, Central China and Northeast China. The heads of these business lines changed from reporting directly to Liu Qiangdong to reporting to Shen Haoyu.
Four months later, CTO Wang Yaqing (later resigned) and CMO Lan Ye joined in succession.
Wang Yaqing obtained a master’s degree in automation control from the University of Connecticut in 1995, and served as the global vice president of Oracle Bone Inscriptions. With Wang Yaqing joining, Li Daxue, the former technical director, turned to Wang Yaqing to report.
Before joining JD.COM, CMO Lan Ye was the President of Founder Technology and the Executive Vice President of Acer China. Because of his experience in managing major customer resources and channels, Lan Ye is responsible for the core business, including open platform, self-operated purchasing and marketing (IT digital purchasing and marketing department, consumer electronics purchasing and marketing department, daily necessities purchasing and marketing department, books and audio-visual purchasing and marketing), as well as brand building and marketing work. After Lan Ye joined, veteran Xu Lei turned to Lan Ye to report (Xu Lei left his post briefly in 2011 and then returned to JD.COM).
In addition, Long Yu, former senior vice president of UT Starcom, Qian Yingchun, former director of investment banking department of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Li Xi, former vice president of Sony, all joined in this period.
But it was not as smooth as the team integration in 2007. The parachuting of professional managers in foreign companies has caused conflicts between the old and the new. The most direct performance is that in mid-2012, Jiang Haidong, the vice president in charge of logistics and warehousing, and Yi Rang, the vice president in charge of strategic development, left their jobs. They are all veterans who joined JD.COM in 2009, making contributions to the logistics construction and strategy formulation in JD.COM. "The ability of General Manager Jiang and General Manager B is still relatively strong, but a group of super CXO executives have come, and the organizational structure has changed too much, which has caused turmoil among junior vice presidents," said a person familiar with JD.COM.
In the conflict between the old and the new, Liu Qiangdong supported the Westernization School. He did not shy away from saying that JD.COM needed fresh blood, and it was normal for one or two senior executives to leave their jobs, even if they were always old-armed.
But Liu Qiangdong also realized that the team was not integrated. He spent seven or eight months on human resources, and made a 360-degree assessment from grassroots employees to every vice president at that time. The assessment content is mainly about whether their values and JD.COM’s values fit. Liu Qiangdong also pulled all the middle and senior managers to the conference room for a day’s meeting to see what everyone’s values are and how cooperative they are, thus eliminating a number of managers.
The professional managers of these foreign companies didn’t let Liu Qiangdong down. In 2013, Liu Qiangdong delegated authority to study abroad, and after returning from the United States at the end of the year, he had a long talk with all senior executives. This conversation made him find that the three tasks assigned to senior executives, especially several CXOs-personnel reorganization, organizational structure adjustment and process reengineering, have been completed and exceeded his expectations. And after more than a year’s combing and rectification by professional managers of foreign companies, the listing conditions of JD.COM are finally mature.
This great change in JD.COM made Liu Qiangdong realize the usefulness of westernization talents. His reuse of Westernization School also extended to Guan Peisheng. As mentioned above, at first, Liu Qiangdong required Guan Peisheng’s family background to be ordinary and hardworking. However, by the end of 2013, JD.COM launched the International Management Training Program, requiring applicants to have MBA education background from internationally renowned business schools. The starting point of international management students is the director/senior manager level. Compared with domestic management students, international management training is the talent reserve of senior management level.
During this period, foreign executives and foreign management students became Liu Qiangdong’s preferred team collocation.
The veteran returned to power and his clique rose.
In 2016, JD.COM made a series of personnel adjustments. The trend of this tone is that the position of professional managers in foreign companies in JD.COM Group system has declined, while the position of old teams has risen.
First, at the end of June, Xiong Qingyun was transferred from the position of head of the market and became the chief brand officer of the group. Xiong Qingyun, a native Chinese with the highest position in P&G, is regarded as a benchmark among professional managers of foreign-funded enterprises in China. After this adjustment, Xiong Qingyun’s position in JD.COM changed from real to virtual.
In August, Shen Haoyu was changed from CEO of JD.COM Mall to President of JD.COM International Business. JD.COM Group has less than 10 international employees, and there is only a space of less than 100 square meters in the United States. Shen Haoyu is equivalent to "soft class". Media Lei Jianping
In addition, Lan Ye, another representative figure of CXO, was transferred to Chief Public Affairs Officer (CPO) as early as the second half of 2015. Recently, his Title of public attendance was changed to "Executive Vice President".
Correspondingly, the internal power of Xu Lei, Wang Zhenhui and other old employees in JD.COM has risen sharply.
Also in the adjustment in June, Xu Lei and Wang Zhenhui were promoted to senior vice presidents. Xu Lei is in charge of the wireless business in JD.COM and the marketing platform system of the mall. This system consists of platform operation department, platform R&D department, marketing department, public relations department, advertising department and user experience design department. Wang Zhenhui returned to the operation system of JD.COM Mall from Jingdong Intelligent Division and served as the head of the operation system of the mall.
Earlier, JD.COM Mall established 3C Division, Household Appliances Division, Consumer Goods Division and Clothing Home Division, and JD.COM Group Vice Presidents Wang Xiaosong, Yan Xiaobing, Yi Feng and Xin Lijun were highly valued.
The reason for this change may be that JD.COM’s growth momentum suddenly braked. In the first quarter of 2016, JD.COM’s transaction volume increased by 55% year-on-year. Although this is much faster than its main rival Alibaba’s retail platform’s 24% transaction volume growth rate, compared with its own growth of 84% and 79% in the whole year and the fourth quarter of last year, it has obviously slowed down, while its revenue growth is only 47%. In 2016, the promotion of JD.COM 618 was not hot enough.
Some people say that a weakness of professional managers is that their fighting capacity is not strong, and they are easy to fall behind in the battle between JD.COM and Alibaba, while Liu Qiangdong needs to fight and JD.COM needs to be wolf.
However, some people say that people are divided into old people and new people, and the local westernization school is too dual. The old people are not good, and the new people are good. The company’s development needs fresh blood, but the core and core can’t be diluted.
What is the kernel of JD.COM? Liu Qiangdong said it was corporate culture. After going through waves of executives’ coming and going and power alternation again and again, Liu Qiangdong said in the self-report published in 2016 that the executive who can adapt to the corporate culture of JD.COM and integrate with the JD.COM team is, "This person must be an executive who has worked in private enterprises or the current environment of China. If you have been working in a foreign company or working abroad most of the time, then I think there may be problems in team integration. "
Fortunately, JD.COM Guan Peisheng, who was trained by JD.COM from scratch and personally guided by Liu Qiangdong, is independent. By the year of 2016, JD.COM has recruited 444 Guan Peisheng, two of whom have been promoted to vice president level and more than 20 have been promoted to director level. A new generation of managers such as Yu Rui, CEO of No.1 Store, Li Ruiyu, director of investment relations, and Zhang Kun, legal person of affiliated companies, have emerged. Compared with self-built logistics, Guan Peisheng system makes Liu Qiangdong more satisfied.
After three rounds of replacement, Liu Qiangdong’s view of employing people has changed from local-Westernization-veteran+Guan Pei. Either way, the present may be the most suitable for JD.COM.
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