Unlocking Persistent Advantage
No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
—James Baldwin1
The year was 2007. Most Americans had not yet heard of Alibaba.
At that time, Alibaba had a pre-IPO value of about $8 billion, a fraction of the nearly $800 billion it has reached recently.2 In 2007, Alibaba was essentially an industrial matchmaker, matching businesses in the West that needed things with firms in the East that made things.
I was leading the New Product Concepts groups at UPS at the time, and a manager in our Treasury department came to me with a novel idea: could UPS be a matchmaker? Could we bring the East and the West together?
While Alibaba made its connections ...
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