On September 10, 2018, Jack Ma, founder and chairman of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, announced his successor (继任者) at the company he founded 19 years ago. Surprisingly, in a country where 70 to 80 percent of private companies are still family run, Mr. Ma did not name a family member. Rather, one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies will be led by Daniel Zhang, an 11-year Alibaba old hand chosen only for his “professional talent”.

The history of many countries can be marked by a trend away from dependence on family succession in business, or the belief that qualities of leadership flow through bloodlines. Ma is a true innovator (创新者) in many ways, most famously for building an innovative online shopping market worth more than the economies of most countries. But his legacy (遗产) may lie in showing how China as well as much of Asia can produce founders of successful organizations unwilling to pass the torch to relatives.

“Alibaba was never about Jack Ma,” he stated in announcing his succession plan. Instead, the former schoolteacher who came from lowly origins is stepping back from day-to-day operations because he has built a system that takes root in a company culture based on innovation, transparency, and responsibility. “For the last 10 years, we kept working on these ingredients,” he stated.

The company’s future will depend on developing a wealth of talent that drives innovation, he said. And in a society with a long tradition of cautious distrust toward those outside the family circle, Ma has built an “architecture of trust” with customers, who number over half a billion. Chinese now readily rely on Alibaba’s online payment system, its ratings of products and services, and other trust-building systems or methods pioneered by the company.

China’s rapid growth now produces a new billionaire almost every day. Many of them, like Ma, have favored systems of management based on talent and honesty. As many countries have discovered as they progress, it is better to swim in a talent pool, not a gene (基因) pool.

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When a corporation is formed, it issues stock (股票), which is sold or given to individuals. Ownership of stock entitles you to vote in the election of a corporation’s directors, so in theory holders of stock control the company. In practice, however, in most large corporations, ownership is separated from control of the firm. Most stockholders have little input into the decisions a corporation makes. Instead, corporations are often controlled by their managers, who often run them for their own benefit as well as for the owners. The reason is that the owners’ control of management is limited.

A large percent of most corporations’ stock is not even controlled by the owners; instead,   is controlled by financial institutions such as mutual funds (financial institutions that invest individuals’ money for them) and by pension funds (financial institutions that hold people’s money for them until it is to be paid out to them upon their retirement). Thus, ownership of I Corporations is another step removed from individuals. Studies have shown that 80 percent of the largest 200 corporations in the US are essentially controlled by managers and have little effective stockholder control.

Why is the question of who controls a firm important? Because economic theory assumes the goal of business owners is to maximize profits , which would be true of corporations if stockholders made the decisions. Managers don’t have the same motivation to maximize profits that owners do. There’s pressure on managers to maximize profits, but that pressure can often be weak or ineffective. An example of how firms deal with this problem involves stock options. Many companies give their managers stock options-rights to buy stock at a low price - to encourage them to worry about the price of their company’s stock. But these stock options dilute (稀释)the value of company ownership and decrease profits per share and can give managers an incentive (激励, 刺激)to overstate profits through accounting tricks, as happened at Enron, Xerox, and a number of other firms.