The Alliance

Managing Talent in the Networked Age

By: Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

Narrated by: Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's Summary

Introducing 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 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 firm to help transform their careers. But this win-win scenario will only happen 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, you'll not only bring back trust, you'll 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 they're on a specific "tour of duty", when they have a mission that's 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 today's world of constant innovation and fast-paced change.

©2014 Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh (P)2014 Blackstone Audiobooks

Not Buying the Premise...

What disappointed you about The Alliance?

To hear these guys tell it, every worker in America is inches from suicide. They set up a completely false premise, and "innovate" a solution that anybody who's managed workforces outside northern california already understands. They have to use 40-year old examples to make their point, and even those are cartoons. This is still the most productive, innovative workforce in history, and "tours of duty" have been an integral part of it for a very long time.

Would you ever listen to anything by the authors again?

Unlikely

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Nothing here is completely untrue -- it's just exaggerated, inaccurate, and well-trodden

If you're starting a company...

If you're starting a company or looking to establish a new process for recruiting, or just setting employee expectations, then this is the book for you. The future of work is being defined by economic forces beyond policy or politics. As a company, you can either fight it or put processes in place to work with these forces and take advantage of them. The smartest companies will adopt many of Reid's recommendations and quickly get ahead of I'm competitors. Reid is very good at taking the best existing ideas and molding them with new creative thinking. I enjoyed listening to this book, but I also bought a hard copy so I could quickly reference sections in real time.

Save your money for other books. Not this one.

I'm disappointed about the book.you can tell there weren't much Reid Hoffman input in this "book".
I am constantly confused about the idea of the book.
It trying to push the company to be more open to its workers of their networking situation. And still not strong enough to proof it's idea after all. Only left confusion to some.
It's more a PR for LinkedIn.

Quick read. Great insights.

Lots of real world examples of success and failures in talent strategies. Tour of Duty programs are an interesting way to grow skills and exposure for highly ambitious employees.

Quick Listen w/ a caveat

Overall good quick read, but would have preferred if the reader had explained the diagrams and tables as they came up in text rather than all at the end.

Highlights a clear path to a resource many of us underutilize

Solid logical approach to ensuring the employee-employer relationship is truly a 2 way street.

A new framework for the modern business

The authors explain that business is not necessarily a family, but a team. Think sports at the highest level, pushing each other to grow and remain flexible. The employer/employee relationship has changed in our modern era. This book describes how and why and what to do for the future.

A good quick read.. some statements stand out.

All in all a good read.. some good basic insights.. uncommon traits and unexplored ideas..

A must read for every CEO, HR Professional, manager... and employee

Rarely to I go and buy 3 copies of the same book whilst being still half way through the book. With The Alliance - this is exactly what I did and I won’t stop at that. I’ll gift a copy to many more ;) Highly recommend!

Roman
CEO, Splento

Great views on modern talent management

Many good and brave views. Lot of valid points worth considering. Only thing I would point is there's quite strong connection with LinkedIn, which might put some stuff in biased way.

better than I expected

I enjoyed this book, it was better than I expected and found it to have lots of useful tips. it all made total sense also.

A whole new perspective

A new perspective on the Company / Employee dynamic and how to make the relationship mutually beneficial