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Professor Liang Tan is a Professor of Practice in Management and Strategy at HKU Business School and Assistant Dean of Customized Programmes for Executive Education.
Guided by his core mission to connect, develop, and inspire leaders of today and tomorrow, Professor Tan focuses on strategy-to-execution in an era shaped by the dual transformations of AI and globalization. His research and practice span three interrelated areas: strategy-to-execution, organizational and cultural transformation, and leadership system design and development.
Professor Tan has developed the 1391 Strategy-to-Execution Framework, which uses the “Three Capabilities and Nine Questions” approach to help enterprises strengthen their strategic, organizational, and leadership capabilities, address critical questions arising from AI transformation and global expansion, and develop enterprise-specific strategy-to-execution roadmaps.
Professor Tan has long worked at the intersection of strategy, organization, and people. His practice centres on two major transformation contexts: enterprise AI transformation and global business expansion. He works with CEOs, senior management teams, key enterprise talent, and future leaders, helping organizations translate strategic choices into organizational capabilities, leadership systems, and actionable transformation initiatives.
Before joining HKU, Professor Tan held senior leadership roles at GE and Alibaba Group. He previously served as Dean of GE Crotonville China, Global Executive Dean of Alibaba Corporate University, CHRO of Alibaba’s B2C Retail Business Group, and Head of Organizational Transformation and Talent Development for Taobao and Tmall Group. Across these roles, he accumulated extensive practical experience in strategy implementation, organizational and cultural transformation, global leadership system development, corporate university building, and CEO and senior team development.
Professor Tan’s research and practice focus on three interrelated domains:
He studies how enterprises identify new value-chain entry points, operating leverage, and strategic focus areas, and translate strategic choices into enterprise-specific transformation roadmaps.
He studies how enterprises redesign critical business scenarios, workflows, governance and collaboration mechanisms, and organizational culture to enable strategic execution in AI transformation and global expansion.
He studies how enterprises design leadership frameworks, assessment and development systems, succession pipelines, and CEO and senior team development initiatives to build future-ready leadership capabilities.
From Alibaba Group
From GE Group
From External Community
In the middle of this month, I attended a forum hosted by the HKU Business School South China Alumni Association Healthcare Chapter in Shenzhen. On my way there, I traveled with Professor Yi Huang from HKU’s Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. During our journey, we discussed his research fields: brain-inspired chips and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
Prof. Roy Tan, Professor of Practice at HKU Business School and Academic Director of Custom Executive Education, argues in Fortune China that HR is undergoing fundamental disruption in 2026 — not incremental change. Drawing on his MBA and EMBA teaching and executive education work with global firms, he identifies three structural breaks: AI has automated HR's traditional workload, leaving the profession without a clear new mandate; the psychological contract between employers and employees has expired without a replacement; and most leadership development frameworks still train leaders for a predictable world that no longer exists. He calls on HR professionals to rebuild from first principles.
In 2024, I taught a master’s course at HKU on the dynamics of multinational corporations. For their capstone graduation project, one student group chose to study the Danish company Too Good To Go.
Returning to Hong Kong from abroad recently, I experienced Libpet’s APS (Autonomous Passenger Service) robot at the Hong Kong International Airport. This wasn't a conceptual product sitting in a showroom; it was operating in a real-world airport environment. After inputting the destination, the robot navigated the route and carried the passenger directly to the designated area.
The low-altitude economy in Hong Kong might not initially take off with flying taxis or drone food delivery. Instead, its true launching pad could be an old building, a facade, a construction site, or urban infrastructure requiring long-term inspection. Recently in an MBA class, a student group conducted a case study on Alpha AI, a local Hong Kong startup.
If the "One-Person Company" (OPC) were merely a buzzword, Hong Kong might not need to take it too seriously. However, it has clearly evolved beyond just a trend. In 2025, the number of startups in Hong Kong surged to a record high of 5,221, employing 19,753 people—proving that the ecosystem is stronger than ever.
Recently, the concept of the "One-Person Company" (OPC) has been gaining massive traction—and this trend extends far beyond social media hype. According to the latest report from Carta, approximately 36% of startups founded on its platform in 2025 were led by a sole founder, up from 31% in 2024.
