The Six Vein Spirit Sword: How Alibaba Forged Its Backbone in 2001

The night was deep. Outside the window, the city lights resembled a lake's surface, rippled by the wind. Inside, people pulled their chairs closer, the atmosphere tense. They had just survived the dot-com winter, but everyone knew the team had made it through on the sheer charisma of its founders and a kind of raw, scrappy spirit.

On the whiteboard, a single, questioning sentence was written:

"How do we forge a backbone for this company?"

What do you do if your team is unstoppable on the attack but grinds against itself in daily collaboration? What if you realize that relying solely on the founders' charm and the team's grit will eventually lead the company to fall apart?

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What you'll learn from Jack Ma's story:

• Write values into a field manual: Convert six slogans into six actions that can be executed and inspected daily.
• Use a "Performance × Values" dual-axis assessment: Resolutely eliminate the "Wild Dogs"—high performers who poison the team culture.
• Embed culture into the system: Seamlessly integrate values into every step of hiring, onboarding, assessment, promotion, and discipline.
• Let rituals and data run in parallel: Give culture both warmth and power through nicknames, customer story sessions, the 9-box grid, and quantifiable small wins.

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The Six Vein Spirit Sword: From a Slogan on the Wall to a Weapon in Hand

"Customer First, Teamwork, Embrace Change, Integrity, Passion, Professionalism"

In 2001, during an all-night internal meeting, these six phrases were written on a whiteboard, one by one. This was not another abstract brainstorming session; it was a "sword-forging" ceremony. The weapon they sought to create was the "Six Vein Spirit Sword," an invisible yet invincible weapon from the martial arts novels of Louis Cha (Jin Yong).

"Every single word must correspond to an action we can take tomorrow," Jack Ma said. He drew a vertical line down the middle of the whiteboard. On the left were the "sword forms" (the values); on the right was the "internal energy" (the concrete actions).

• Customer First → Every day, publicly dissect the toughest customer problem and produce a solution on the spot.
• Teamwork → Every daily stand-up must begin by praising a teammate for a specific task they completed well the day before.
• Embrace Change → Every team must run at least one "small experiment" per week and openly review its success or failure.
• Integrity → Work reports must use only three phrases: "I did it," "I failed to do it," and "Here is why I failed."
• Passion → Every Friday, each person shares their "most exciting 10 minutes of the week," no matter how small.
• Professionalism → Core business functions must have a defined SLA (Service Level Agreement), such as "All inquiries must be replied to within 30 minutes."

"Sword fighting isn't learned by memorizing a manual," he said, tapping the right side of the board. "It's learned by practicing, one move at a time." What was written there were not slogans; they were disciplines.

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The 9-Box Grid: A Blueprint for the Team's Destiny

Culling the "Wild Dogs"

A hand-drawn 9-box grid was laid out on the table. The x-axis was "Performance," from low to high. The y-axis was "Adherence to Values," from poor to excellent. This grid classified every employee into nine types.

• In the top-right were the "Stars," who excelled in both performance and values. They were to be heavily rewarded.
• In the middle and on the left were the "Rabbits," who had potential but needed coaching. They were to be given a chance.
• In the bottom-right were the "Wild Dogs": high performers with poor values.

"We reward the Stars, and we give the Rabbits soil to grow in. But we must cull the Wild Dogs, no matter how good their performance is."

The first time this grid was used for quarterly reviews, an incredibly difficult case emerged: a top salesperson, who carried the team's KPI almost single-handedly, was consistently flagged for poor marks on "Integrity" and "Teamwork." The debate in the conference room lasted for hours. In the end, the sales champion was let go.

Ma told the HR director, "If you don't fire him today, you will lose an entire team tomorrow."

That day, the office hallways were eerily quiet. The next day, almost everyone began to reread the "actions" on the right side of the whiteboard, word for word.

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Embedding Culture into the System: Four Checkpoints

1. Hiring: "Tell me about a time you failed."

Interview questions changed. They were no longer solely focused on past KPIs. Every candidate had to answer several "value-based" questions:

1. Tell me about a time you went the "extra mile" for a customer.
2. Describe a situation where you had a major disagreement with a colleague and how you moved forward together.
3. Tell me about a recent project you consider a failure, and walk me through why it failed.

"We want to hire people who are already wired to act this way, not people who have to learn to recite these six phrases after they join." A senior "culture officer" was given "one-vote veto power," regardless of a candidate's business prowess.

2. Onboarding: Nickname, Shifu, and the First "Hello"

On their first day, a new employee had to do three things: choose a "nickname" (花名) from a martial arts novel, be assigned a senior mentor or "Shifu" (师傅), and immediately make a phone call to a real customer.

• The Nickname: Not for fun, but to instantly flatten hierarchy, allowing a junior "Xiao Er" to speak directly with a senior "Feng Qingyang," making information flow faster.
• The Shifu: Not a formality, but a way to transmit culture through a living person rather than a handbook. Your Shifu was a reflection of the "future you."
• The First Call: Made new hires feel the pulse of "Customer First" from day one.

3. Assessment: Performance × Values, in Black and White

During quarterly reviews, performance and values were given fixed weights, and the scores were made public. Anyone could challenge the basis of a rating.

• Frontline Staff: Performance 60% × Values 40%
• Managers: Performance 40% × Values 60%

Any case of "high performance, low values" would automatically trigger a "Calibration Meeting," where cross-departmental managers would review the case to ensure fairness and uphold the red line against any exceptions for "personal connections" or "high performance."

4. Promotion & Discipline: A Hall of Fame and a Pillar of Shame

Every promotion announcement was paired with a detailed "positive value-based case study" explaining how the promoted individual embodied the company's values. Conversely, every serious disciplinary action had to explicitly state "which of the Six Veins was violated, and what the specific action was."

Honor and shame both had a name and a paper trail.

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Rituals Give Values a Warmth

Friday Night "Customer Stories"

Every Friday before clocking out, half an hour was reserved for the "Customer Story Session." This wasn't about success porn. It was about sharing the bloody process: from an inquiry that went unanswered, to a sample that was repeatedly revised, to the final signed contract—and all the pits the team fell into and filled together along the way.

The story wall in the office slowly filled up. In the bottom-right corner of each A4 sheet was a number: This deal took us X days.

A Cautionary Tale of "Passion" Crossing the Line

Once, a highly passionate salesperson, eager to close a deal, promised a client a delivery timeline that was far beyond the company's actual capabilities. The company paid a heavy price to honor the promise. But more importantly, a notice was posted on the internal bulletin board:

• The salesperson had to publicly apologize to the service teams.
• He was tasked with leading a project to create a "Sales Promise Capability Checklist" for everyone to study.
• The action guide for the value of "Passion" was immediately revised with a new footnote: "Before making a promise, you must first verify internal capabilities and resources."

As Ma said in a meeting, "Passion is for overcoming challenges, not for steamrolling rules. Our values are not a shield for you to do whatever you want; they are the boundary lines that define our actions."

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Once the Skeleton is in Place, the Muscles Can Grow

Someone once asked why, in the dead of that post-crisis winter, with resources so scarce, they spent so much time on "invisible things."

Ma's answer was: "Because the visible things—like products and technology—are always changing. Only the invisible things can keep an organization from falling apart during radical change. We had to build the skeleton first, so the muscles could grow on it correctly."

That year, after the Friday story sessions, many people started staying late voluntarily, showing new colleagues their "most exciting 10 minutes of the week." The Six Vein Spirit Sword had stepped down from the wall and entered the bloodstream and breath of every person.

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Key Takeaways

1. Write Values into a Field Manual: Six abstract nouns must correspond to six specific, executable, and verifiable daily actions.
2. Dual-Axis Assessment to Cull the "Wild Dogs": Consistently use the Performance × Values 9-box grid to eliminate high performers who damage the culture. This is the decisive battle for whether values can be truly implemented.
3. Systemic Embedding is Fundamental: Deeply plant values into the entire lifecycle of hiring, onboarding, assessment, and promotion, so that culture no longer depends on the founders' charisma.
4. Rituals and Data Give Culture Life: Through customer stories, quantifiable small wins, and clear case studies of reward and punishment, values gain both a heart-touching warmth and an unchallengeable authority.