The Alliance ─ Managing Talent in the Networked Age

Redefining workplace loyalty for a morenetworked ageAs individual workers become more entrepreneurial-managingtheir own careers, jumping from job to job, and assembling their owndistinctive professional narratives-the burden is now on managers to keep anorganization running. The Alliance addresses this very real challenge for both companies and their people.Written by an impressive trio of thinkers and doers-LinkedIncofounder Reid Hoffman, author and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, and executive andinvestor Chris Yeh-the book offers the first concrete advice on generatingvalue for employees and companies in today's networked world. Building ontheir 2013 article in the Harvard Business Review, Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact, theauthors propose a new framework that unearths opportunities for all partiesinvolved in the pact, reflecting an optimistic view of future employee-employerrelations.The framework-or new talent alliance-relies on a modernsystem of loyalty between companies and employees. No longer one based onlifetime employment, this updated approach takes into account today's volatileeconomic realities and moves from a transactional to a relational approachbetween parties. The pact nets benefits for each: the employee makes thecompany more valuable through his work, and in turn the firm invests back intothat employee's growth and, therefore, his overall employability.This mutually beneficial deal constitutes the new loyaltypact based on trust and investment-something employers, managers, and employeescan agree on.