The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age Audiobook

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.

Download and start listening now!

“The Alliance provides practical, step-by-step guidance for how to create a more modern, enduring social contract between managers and employees, one that acknowledges the changing nature of the job market…but the authors’ recommendations go far beyond best practices. The book provides detailed guidance on how managers can actually implement the best management practices from Silicon Valley, including a surprisingly robust appendix with exercises and links to additional resources. The advice contained in this book is as useful for a Fortune 100 CEO as it is for a startup founder working out of a garage—as insightful for someone developing a new app as it is for someone opening a new coffee shop…The alliance Reid and his coauthors have imagined, and then explain with clarity and insight, might seem elusive, but it’s really within the grasp of anyone who cares about building trust and making a mutual investment in the future…Leave it to the guy who revolutionized the way we think about jobs online to revolutionize the way we think of them in the real world, too.”

— Eric Schmidt, executive chairman, Google; and Jared Cohen, head of Google Ideas