The Alliance

Managing Talent in the Networked Age

By: Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

Narrated by: Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

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

The Life time employment alternative

The alliance frame work as proposed in this book is the perfect solution for today's talent starved companies. The alliance offers both the company and employee an opportunity to forge a relationship that will last a life time.

This book is transformation and provides clear direction for achieving lasting alliances.

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.

Employer of Choice

Great strategy to attract, retain and develop talent. Struggling with millennials? Put The Alliance into place! Create a successful boomerang process.

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.