Part-2: Lessons from Jack Ma’s success and Vadilal’s not-so-successful ice-cream run
Prakash Iyer, in his book ‘The Habit of Winning’ uses Jack Ma’s Alibaba.com and Vadilal’s ice-cream business to talk about the power of focus. He reports on an event he attended in 2000, where he witnessed Jack Ma, in flesh and blood, talk about how alibaba’s success was built on ‘not changing the rabbit’. At this event, Jack Ma said that if there are nine rabbits running around and you want to catch one, focus only on one. “If you try to catch them all, you may end up with none. If the rabbit you’re chasing proves elusive, change your tactics. Don’t change the rabbit.”
‘Powerful advice that’, says Iyer. I would agree. If you’re certain you only want to catch one rabbit, you’re right to focus on just one. Learn its specific behaviour and tailor your tactics accordingly, he explains. Makes perfect sense. In retrospect all success does. In retrospect, all failure does too. He juxtaposes the story of Gujarat’s Vadilal ice-cream with that of Alibaba. According to Iyer, Vadilal chased more than one rabbit – ready-to-eat foods, ice-cream, forex, real estate, chemicals… and, so it’s not where Alibaba is. But, and I checked, Vadilal is still going strong as a brand, expanding its business (reported EBITDA of 186.88 Cr in 2025, up from 165.69 Cr a year before).
The thing that most people do, especially management folks, is try to rationalise success (and failures), blindly following Harvard’s case study method. In my opinion, it is no better than Indian parents telling their wards about the neighbour’s class topper son, “Look, Amit did it, why can’t you?”
They don’t consider the multitude of things that led to that one specific success or failure. When Jack Ma had the idea to start Alibaba, he had had to have been an English teacher in Beijing. He had had to have had proficiency in English that made him a person in great demand when English-speaking businessmen flew in as delegates from other countries, trying to do business in China. He had had to have such contacts, as well as credibility, as to find him at the core of those meetings. He had had to have had the entrepreneurial chops to conceive of alibaba along with at least 18(!) friends who’d pledge their money into his startup. Jack Ma also had had to have the kind of ecosystem accessible to him through China’s pro-business policies that made alibaba grow and survive a big bust later on.
The same can be said of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and everyone else who succeeded and who didn’t. Market factors, the environment at home, personality, individual goals, ecosystem, everything counts. Change one factor and everything changes. The case study method, while effective in helping students understand a concept by example, is truly narrow when trying to communicate nuances. It focuses on one or two aspects of successes while others go unexamined.
To use Amit’s analogy…
Chances are that Amit’s parents filled up their home with books, maintained strict boundaries and had high expectations of their son, while Amit, himself, was born with a disposition that makes him interested in academic enquiry. He’ll probably crack the top engineering exams or become a doctor. Or a scientist at a big uni abroad. But, it could have swung the other way as well. That Amit’s dad was a hard taskmaster, sometimes meting out corporal punishment, while his mother, scared of conflict, choose to look the other way, and Amit performed well simply out of fear of being punished. Amit may be a board topper now; but he might have his first nervous breakdown at 32. Who knows what will happen. Really.
But you’re not Amit, are you? Your parents are not his parents. And so, if he is chasing a rabbit, you’re perhaps chasing an elephant, or a penguin, or a bat. Again, who knows? Therefore, you need to find out what you want to chase. And be ready to pay the costs. We merely assume that Alibaba got its rabbit – domination in China/world(?). We don’t really know at what cost. Its income bar charts show an up-trend but do we know what really goes on behind the business and in the lives of those people involved? The Chinese have a culture of 9-9-6, do we want that? It’s too simplistic to think that individual successes (and failures) are so fungible. We know for sure that Jack Ma was not seen in public for a long time, causing intense speculation. That’s the issue with the case study method. It gets worse when this method becomes normalised, as self-help genre has done.
When the future has happened, it’s easy to look back and say, “Oh, now I know why this happened”. Or, as Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Vadilal and Alibaba both trust that dots will connect somehow in the future. Neither is a story finished. If one is chasing a rabbit the other is chasing… not a rabbit. Both are okay. Guys like Iyer try to say that success is linear. That’s it’s only the shape of a rabbit. No. Success is many different things in different contexts. It’s a shape-shifter. It’s the most adaptable animal there is, actually.
Speaking of personal experience, success to me was once leading the content strategy for a company and getting them noticed across various media platforms. Then it was doing 40+ projects a year for various clients at a stakeholder communications firm. Now as a single mom, success is to be able to find the time to play a game of carrom and make art with my son each day while balancing my responsibilities as a full-time educator teaching in a school. I’m an English teacher too, like Jack Ma, but I don’t want to set up an alibaba even if my 18 friends pushed me into it. I don’t want to go down that rabbit-hole.
Management speak is all about homogenising this definition of success. That approach doesn’t work – it robs us of our humanity. Unfortunately, most management leaders have all the power but very little wisdom to realise this.
Teacher Takes Notes 