This is why choice is more important than effort; in the wrong direction, the harder you try, the more you fail

@阑夕：Yesterday, right after Alibaba's sharp commentary on DingTalk's management culture was published, some veteran Alibaba employees in the group sensed the vibe, asserting that they were not going to protect Wuzhao anymore.

Sure enough, Wuzhao was removed from the CEO position today. Solving the equation is indeed fast.

Wuzhao's real name is Chen Hang. He is indeed the founder of DingTalk in the strictest sense. He is also one of the rare people within Alibaba who managed to earn a second chance of trust from Jack Ma. He built DingTalk under the pressure of repeated failures, which counts as a solid, illustrious military achievement.

Leaving due to the "Cloud-DingTalk Integration" structural adjustment, then being packaged along with his startup in an acquisition years later, and being re-appointed as the top leader of DingTalk—this narrative is very Steve Jobs-like, if everything had gone smoothly.

But there is no such "if".

Inside DingTalk, people are quite happy about Wuzhao's second departure. The work intensity was simply too high, and more importantly, the pressure yielded no feedback. In the internet industry, being busy is not a problem; being busy without meaning is the real issue.

Having said that, it's actually rare to see anyone question Wuzhao's character. Employees feel he might not be a bad person, but he is doing something akin to marking the boat to find the sword—using tactical diligence to cover up strategic incompetence.

After returning to DingTalk last year, the first thing Wuzhao did was move the core team back to the residential apartment at Lakeside Gardens. That is Alibaba's Jerusalem; it was from there that Jack Ma led the "Eighteen Arhats" to start the business. After the Laiwang project failed, Wuzhao also ground out DingTalk at Lakeside Gardens. It can be called both a holy land and a lucky place.

Wuzhao has always believed he could bring DingTalk back to 1999, back to 2014, back to the state where everyone had nothing and was fighting with their backs against the wall, and then replicate the past path to fight another beautiful turnaround.

For a few trusted core backbones, this high-pressure environment with high expectations might be transformed into motivation to strive. But times have changed. It is no longer the era where brothers could finish a project, eat big meals, drink heavily, and then continue full of energy, living at the company.

Wuzhao also firmly believed that going door-to-door to visit small businesses again would find the right direction for DingTalk, because that's how it succeeded over a decade ago. Setting aside whether this attribution is valid, what was the enterprise market environment like over ten years ago? How does the low digitalization and low mobilization of that time compare to today?

Repeating past methods to turn things around—how could it be that simple in this world?

I remember during the special three-year period, the situation wasn't like this. The enterprise software mocked the most in the industry was actually Feishu...

At that time, Feishu was evaluated as ByteDance's BU with the lowest human efficiency ratio. Several thousand people were making a product that barely made any money. Compared to ByteDance's various cash-cow businesses, it was practically a stain on the family. Meanwhile, DingTalk, relying on the dividends of remote work and online classes, saw its data skyrocket and was in its absolute prime.

After the rise of AI, the market polarized in reverse. Feishu, with an active user base far smaller than DingTalk's, achieved a revenue scale that is gradually narrowing the gap, approaching a 50-50 split. This means that in terms of persuasiveness in getting enterprises to pay, Feishu is stronger than DingTalk.

I think Wuzhao has an inner demon. Since "Cloud-DingTalk Integration" was wrong, and since I was brought back to set things right, then DingTalk must develop independently and can no longer be constrained by Alibaba's system. This is a bit like the logic of overcorrecting—using one extreme to respond to another. DingTalk's AI transformation is very ambitious, but whether it can deliver heavily depends on concrete results.

This is also the principle that choice is more important than effort; if the direction is wrong, the harder you try, the more you fail.

It's evident that Wuzhao likes his alias, but the things he does and the internal friction he causes completely lack the relaxed state of "no moves beat having moves" (Wuzhao sheng youzhao). This is quite a pity.