Jack Ma talks about the ‘4 cannots’ and the dangers of success

There’s a lot of advice out there for how startups can climb their way to the top of the heap. But once you’re there, how do you stay there? How do you keep the crown and avoid all the pitfalls that can knock you off your perch?

Keeping the crown is something that Jack Ma knows a little about, given that his company Alibaba has been the dominant force in China’s ecommerce market for well over a decade. And in a recent conversation with famed Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang, who’s directing Alibaba’s Singles Day Eve entertainment bonanza, Ma apparently laid out what he sees as one major pitfall for successful people in any industry: the “four cannots.”

Ma hasn’t spoken publicly about the four cannots, but Feng Xiaogang mentioned the idea as having impressed him at a recent press event for the upcoming Singles Day fling, and gave listeners a summary of what Ma had said. Based on that and bit of my own extrapolation, here are Jack Ma’s “four cannots” and how they might apply to your business:

Photo by Isengardt

The first: cannot see

The problem with being big and successful is that you can easily lose sight of the little guy. As Ma put it to Feng, when you’re a big and successful director, you’re probably not aware of all the hungry filmmakers out there with great ideas who haven’t made movies yet. It’s not that you’re ignoring them, it’s that you’re literally not aware they exist. You cannot see them.

This is a problem in any business, but it’s especially important to tech, where that “unseen” startup out there might be the one with the idea that can push you off your pedestal or disrupt your business model. It also might be the perfect acquisition that can take your company to the next level. But if you’re not aware it exists, you cannot possibly react to it. The solution, then, is pretty simple: you need to keep a very close eye on your market. Not just on the big companies that compete with you now, but on the tiny seed-round players who might compete with you five or ten years down the line.

The second: cannot respect

The second cannot is the ego trap: you’re aware of a smaller, less successful competitor, but you look down on them. In filmmaking terms, Ma told Feng, this is like a big director of Feng’s caliber not respecting a new filmmaker with no films on his resume.

On the one hand, it’s totally reasonable: Feng has a bunch of blockbusters under his belt, and this guy hasn’t even started shooting his first yet! Why shouldn’t Feng write him off, at least until he’s made some bigger waves? It’s an understandable attitude.

But that’s a dangerous attitude to have, because everybody starts from nothing, and most people precede their success with a bunch of failures. When you become aware of a startup in your sector that’s a potential long-term competitor, you might be tempted to write them off because their founder has no relevant experience, or because they haven’t raised a big round or built an impressive brand. But that’s the trap – a startup that looks unimpressive can still be threatening. Jack Ma knows a lot about that, having beaten eBay in China with what eBay would once have seen as just a small, weak startup founded by some no-name guy no one had heard of.

The third: cannot understand

The second cannot leads into the third. If you don’t respect your potential competition, even when they’re still tiny, then you probably can’t understand exactly what they’re doing, and you’ll have a hard time responding when they do achieve success.

The fourth: cannot keep up