The Alliance

The Alliance: Managing Talent In The Networked Age

by Reid Hoffman

"Alignment means that managers should explicitly seek and highlight the commonality between the company’s purpose and values and the employee’s career purpose and values"

This book presents a framework to manage, recruit, and retain talent in the modern age. It is based on the premise that employees are no longer looking to build their whole careers by working at the same place and moving up the chain of command. Simply said, 

"The traditional model of lifetime employment, so well-suited to periods of relative stability, is too rigid for today’s networked age."

Reid Hoffman suggests that employees should be treated as free agents joining a team, not as children that belong to their professional family. In The Alliance, Hoffman argues that by being completely transparent and having an honest conversation, both the employer and the employee will understand each other's expectations and a trustworthy and effective relationship will develop.

Hoffman presents the tour of duty concept, which he borrows from the military forces. In a tour of duty, a person is given a clear mission, with a given set of goals, constraints, milestones and deliverables. The job is not done until the tour of duty is completed. By offering tours of duty to employees, the employer accepts the fact that the employee might leave the company after the tour of duty has been completed. The key is to align the tour of duty with the employee's personal goals to guarantee that the employee will want to at least finish the tour of duty before leaving the company.

There are three types of tour of duties that can be offered:

1. Rotational
2. Transformational
3. Foundational

Rotational

These tours of duty assume a high turnover rate after completion of the duty. Therefore, the employee's role will be predefined and structured.

"The purpose of this type of Rotational tour is to allow both parties to assess the potential long-term fit between employer and employee"

Transformational

The idea of a transformational tour of duty is for it to be flexible and personalized to each candidate. It attempts to align with the midterm goals of the employee. They consist of 1-3 year plans where the employee will work to transform the company in a significant way. 

"Transformational tours provide adaptability by helping companies bring in the specific skills and experiences required."

Foundational

The focus of the foundational tour of duty is to provide an environment where the company's long term strategy is aligned with the employee's long term goals. Exceptional alignment of employer and employee is the hallmark of a Foundational tour. Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours.

This book goes into detail on how to implement each tour of duty, and which tour of duty works best for different job requirements. Here are some of the key lessons I learned from this book:

• Think of employment as an alliance: a mutually beneficial deal, with explicit terms, between independent players.
• Employees need to tell their bosses, “Help me grow and flourish , and I’ll help the company grow and flourish.”
• Tours of duty focus on honorably accomplishing a specific, finite mission.
• Rotational tours provide scalability by helping companies hire large numbers of employees into stable, well-understood roles. 
• Transformational tours provide adaptability by helping companies bring in the specific skills and experiences required.
• Foundational tours provide continuity by helping companies retain employees who focus on the long term.
• By focusing on building alignment for the duration of a specific mission, a tour of duty reduces the issue of aligning values and aspirations to a manageable scope.
• Both manager and employee have an explicit (albeit non-binding) agreement with shared objectives and realistic expectations. This agreement provides the criteria for regular, mutual performance measurement and management. 
• The employee and the company don’t have to be aligned forever, just for the length of the tour of duty.

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link