Synopses & Reviews
A New York Times BestsellerIntroducing the new, realistic loyalty pact between employer and employee.
The employer-employee relationship is broken, and managers face a seemingly impossible dilemma: the old model of guaranteed long-term employment no longer works in a business environment defined by continuous change, but neither does a system in which every employee acts like a free agent.
The solution? Stop thinking of employees as either family or as free agents. Think of them instead as allies.
As a manager you want your employees to help transform the company for the future. And your employees want the company to help transform their careers for the long term. But this win-win scenario will happen only if both sides trust each other enough to commit to mutual investment and mutual benefit. Sadly, trust in the business world is hovering at an all-time low.
We can rebuild that lost trust with straight talk that recognizes the realities of the modern economy. So, paradoxically, the alliance begins with managers acknowledging that great employees might leave the company, and with employees being honest about their own career aspirations.
By putting this new alliance at the heart of your talent management strategy, youll not only bring back trust, youll be able to recruit and retain the entrepreneurial individuals you need to adapt to a fast-changing world.
These individuals, flexible, creative, and with a bias toward action, thrive when theyre on a specific tour of duty”when they have a mission thats mutually beneficial to employee and company that can be completed in a realistic period of time.
Coauthored by the founder of LinkedIn, this bold but practical guide for managers and executives will give you the tools you need to recruit, manage, and retain the kind of employees who will make your company thrive in todays world of constant innovation and fast-paced change.
Review
Recommended Reading: 10 Books on Creative Leadership”
Forbes
an insightful look at the new employer-employee relationship (especially for those of us on-boarding Gen Y and soon Millennials). Ken Tencer, CEO of Spyder Works Inc., Globe and Mail
This book will force you to see the future, it will show you new models of work, and it has the eminence and perspective to make your entire team think
an important new book which is well worth a read.” Forbes
an essential handbook for dealing with the challenges of managing an ever more connected, ever more mobile workforce.” Barnes and Noble
In a provocative new book, the father of social networks reveals a startling new way to reframe the relationship between employers and employees.” Fortune magazine
Readers will discover in this engaging book that the relationship between employee and employer doesn't have to be branded as It's complicated." TD magazine (Association for Talent Development)
For those of you who havent read The Alliance, Reid, Casnocha and Yeh make a compelling case for a third model that treats employees as allies.” Human Resource Executive
ADVANCE PRAISE for The Alliance:
Jeffrey R. Immelt, Chairman and CEO, General Electric
GE is competing in its third century. The key to sustained performance is developing competitive leaders in every era. The Alliance captures the essence of modern talent development: trust and mutual value creation helps both employer and employee compete in the marketplace. The authors lay out a framework that helps big companies as well as start-ups develop their people more effectively, while creating a competitive team.”
Kenneth I. Chenault, Chairman and CEO, American Express
Engaged employees are the key to success in any business. The Alliance is a terrific book that offers real-world insights on how to build loyalty, inspire creativity, and manage winning teams for the long term.”
Synopsis
Redefining workplace loyalty for a more networked ageAs individual workers become more entrepreneurialmanaging their own careers, jumping from job-to-job and assembling their own distinctive professional narrativesthe burden is now on managers to keep an organization running. The Alliance addresses this very real challenge both for companies and their people.
Written by an impressive trio of thinkers and doersLinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, author and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, and executive and investor Chris Yehthe book offers the first concrete advice on generating value both for employees and companies in todays networked world. Building on their 2013 article in Harvard Business Review (Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact,” June 2013), the authors propose a new framework that unearths opportunity for all parties involved in the pact, reflecting an optimistic view of future employee-employer relations.
The frameworkor new talent alliancerelies on a modern system of loyalty between companies and employees. No longer one based on lifetime employment, this updated approach takes into account todays volatile economic realities and moves from a transactional to a relational approach between parties. The pact nets benefits for each: the employee makes the company more valuable through his work and in turn, the firm invests back into that employees growth and, therefore, his overall employability.
This mutually beneficial deal constitutes the new loyalty pact based on trust and investmentsomething employers, managers, and employees can agree on.
About the Author
Reid Hoffman is cofounder and Executive Chairman of LinkedIn, the worlds largest professional network, and partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock.
Ben Casnocha is an award-winning entrepreneur and bestselling coauthor, with Reid, of The Start-up of You. He is a frequent speaker on talent management.
Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur, writer, and mentor. He helps interesting people do interesting things as VP of Marketing at PBworks and general partner at Wasabi Ventures.