Posted on 11/13/2019 9:28:10 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Alibaba founder Jack Ma is worth US$41.8 billion (AU$60.8 billion). But before he founded his empire 20 years ago, he was rejected from over 30 jobs.
“I failed my exams for primary school. I failed my exams for middle schools. And I failed three times to enter university,” Ma told Forbes’ Global CEO conference in Singapore.
“I tried for jobs – over 30 – all rejected. People would look at the diploma [and ask], ‘What? Where are you from?’”
The emphasis companies place on education and academics means Ma, today, would never be considered for a job at his own company.
“People like me today, if I tried for a job at Alibaba…it’s almost impossible.
“They think, we have a group of people from Harvard, a group of people from Stanford, and you are from nowhere.
“They judge you by your diploma.”
In fact, two of his own young entrepreneurs, who were early founders of payments system Alipay and e-commerce site Taobao, failed the exam to get into MBA courses.
“They want to join the MBA schools, so I called the schools because they wanted me to recommend them. They went, took a test, and both failed. They were turned back,” Ma said.
“I called the President, and he told me they were no good at maths, no good at taking exams. I said, ‘Sir, if they’re good at taking exams, they will never be entrepreneurs’.”
“Most entrepreneurs become business people because their schooling was bad.”
The education system is at fault for not preparing kids for the digital age, Ma said.
“Most of the things we teach our kids, the way we teach our kids, for the past 200 years, are industrial – for the industrial period,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at au.finance.yahoo.com ...
Ma has a point. The world is full of people with useless degrees and no common sense. They are particularly concentrated around cities like Washington, DC and Brussels.
This is probably the case for any enterpreuer who doesn’t have a college education, and/or degrees from the prestige universities.
If you start a company, and it grows, and you hire employees, and have an HR department, which sets job descriptions and qualifications for jobs etc, then you are screening out people who may be capable but don’t meet the standards set by HR in the job descriptions.
Bill Gates couldn’t be hired by Microsoft, because he doesn’t have a college degree. He dropped out as I recall.
Today, it has to be a STEM degree as well ...
If the founder/CEO allows the company to exclude people like himself, whose fault is it?
Jack Ma is like Bill Gates & Zuckerberg.
They are all academic failures.
Nothing is more dangerous than failures with lots of money. They buy up good companies and turn them bad. Poor quality communist products, makes you sick that Congress won’t kill off monopolies.
Tariff them.
Capitalism is the home garage inventor.
Capitalism is not big money, big corporation seeking replacement migration.
“Bill Gates couldn’t be hired by Microsoft,”
Not only that, he’s white. However, he’s a craft bastard. Anyone who actually read the story of how Microsoft came about, they teach that meeting with IBM in B schools as an example of “innovation”.
Meaning you bullsH8t your way into the job..
I thought it was because he looks like an alien.
You can be ‘overeducated’ and not have any smarts.
“They think, we have a group of people from Harvard, a group of people from Stanford, and you are from nowhere.
“They judge you by your diploma.”
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