Jack Ma explains how he teaches entrepreneurs using failure and faith

Did you know that Jack Ma has his own university?

OK, it’s not really a full-on university, but Jack Ma is one of the main men behind Lakeside University, the Hangzhou-based entrepreneur training school that we peeked inside last year just as it was about to begin its first round of classes. Now, the school is kicking off its second year, and Jack Ma was there to give the inaugural address. In it, he laid out an explanation of just how different Lakeside University’s program is from a traditional MBA.

There are some detailed differences between this school and an MBA. We don’t teach people how to be successful, we tell everyone how other people failed. All of the cases are based on failure, although they are not all about failures – this is a unique aspect of our training.

I joke that there’s a big difference between Chinese films and Western films. We both worship heroes, but in the Western movies the hero always lives in the end. In our movies the heroes all die; you become a hero by dying, so who wants to be a hero? But the great Western heroes always live. Here at our entrepreneur training school, we want our angles, questions, and methods to teach you to be like that [i.e., teach you to survive]. So we want everyone to study how other people failed, the kinds of mistakes they made, and how they dealt with these mistakes.

Every entrepreneur must have faith

Among the entrepreneurs here, do we have luck? We have luck, do we have opportunity? We have opportunity. In theory, luck and opportunity are about the same for everyone. But when you run into disaster, everyone has different ways of handling it. We need to have imagination and independent thinking. We hope that every Lakeside University entrepreneur has a future and that every Chinese person can believe in themselves […]

But every entrepreneur must have faith, because only with faith will you not be tempted into doing this and that [instead of focusing]. Only with faith will your strategy be focused; without it your strategy will be unfocused and you will be lost. I hope everyone remembers that.