The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

Table of contents

Chapter 1: Employment in the Networked Age
Chapter 2: Tours of Duty
Chapter 3: Building Alignment in a Tour of Duty
Chapter 4: Implementing Transformational Tours of Duty
Chapter 5: Employee Network Intelligence
Chapter 6: Implementing Network Intelligence Programs
Chapter 7: Corporate Alumni Networks
Chapter 8: Implementing an Alumni Network
Book Notes

Chapter 1: Employment in the Networked Age

The employee-employer relationship is based on a dishonest conversation, one where the employee can be fired “at-will” but the employer is asking for loyalty.

This is an old model of employment, meant for an era of stability, when an employee would stay at a company for life. As a result of shareholder capitalism that valued short term profits that required “rightsizing” (firing) to meet short term goals, this paradigm changed.

This old way is too rigid, so companies have often reduced the employee-employer relationship to a legal, binding contract, but this changes companies most valuable resource (talent) to a fungible one in the name of quick profits.

A business without loyalty is a business without long-term thinking. A business without long-term thinking is a business that’s unable to invest in the future. And a business that isn’t investing in tomorrow’s opportunities and technologies—well, that’s a company already in the process of dying.

The business world needs a new employment framework that facilitates mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit.

This book’s goal is outlining a framework, an alliance, between employees and employers.

The idea that a company’s culture is “family” is flawed – imagine firing a poorly performing child. The right paradigm is team, which has a specific mission, and its members come together to accomplish that mission.

[…] the idea of a family still has relevance because it defines how we treat each other—with compassion, appreciation, and respect.

The real value of Silicon Valley is that it is all about the people. In the new economy, the “founder mind-set” or entrepreneurial thinking are the most important. In old world, efficiency was paramount, but that led to higher and higher degrees of specialization, or the infamous buggy-whip manufacturer.

Today, entrepreneurial thinking and doing are the most important capabilities companies need from their employees.

Two examples:

John Lasseter started at Disney and after seeing computer-generated animation pitched the idea of making a completely computer-generated movie to Disney. Disney promptly fired him, and he went on to found Pixar. Eventually, Disney bought Pixar for >$7 billion.
The idea from AWS didn’t come from Bezos or the executive team, but a regular employee, Benjamin Black. Eventually Bezos greenlit the project so Black could develop AWS, which is hugely profitable.

Some important questions this book asks:

How do I build trust and loyalty with my employees if I can’t guarantee lifetime employment?
How does the alliance apply to different types and levels of employees?
How do I build a relationship with my entrepreneurial employees when our ultimate goals and values might differ?
What kind of networking and personal brand building should I allow my employees to do in the workplace?
How can I run an effective corporate alumni network given limited time and resources?

Chapter 2: Tours of Duty

In the context of the alliance, the tour of duty represents an ethical commitment by employer and employee to a specific mission. […] By recasting careers at your company as a series of successive tours of duty, you can better attract and retain entrepreneurial employees.

Some might be worried that tours of duty framework gives employees permission to leave, but that is a dishonest relationship that an employer should give “permission” for any employee to leave.

These ideas were tested in Silicon Valley, one of the fastest moving, most competitive economies on the planet, where retaining talent is immensely difficult. If they work there, they can work anywhere.

The tour of duty framework
	Design	Deal	Duration	Transition
Rotational	Incoming employees are onboarded programmatically	Assessment of potential future fit at the company; predictable employment	For typical analyst programs, usually on to three years, for other rotational tours, ongoing	Employee may start another rotation or shift to a Transformational tour; little to no moral onus for leaving the company afterward
Transformational	Negotiated individually	Transformation of employee’s career, transformation of company	Determined by the specific mission, usually two to five years	Prior to completing the mission, employee negotiates new tour at existing company or transition out
Foundational	Negotiated individually	For company, a steward of core values, for employee, deep purpose and meaning from work	Ongoing	Both parties anticipate the relationship will be permanent and make their best efforts to stay together

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.

stars vs middle class

	stars	middle class
job title	Regular upgrades	Not necessarily any change
who leads the process	Their managers	Managers, but with employees taking a more active, proactive role
employee goal	Advancing the company and their career by achieving aggressive goals	Maintaining employability by helping the company adapt

Chapter 3: Building Alignment in a Tour of Duty

Aligning Employee Goals and Values with the Company’s

In the Industrial Age, the company subsumed an employee’s individual identity. Today, a modern company cannot expect its corporate purpose to become the sole purpose of the employee.

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.

For the different tours (Rotational, Transformational, and Foundational), there is increasing overlap between employee interests and company interests that intersect in mission alignment.

three steps to building alignment

establish and disseminate the company’s core mission and values
- A good mission and values statement should be specific and rigorous enough so that some competent players will feel a strong alignment, while others will understand that the company just isn’t a good fit.
learn each individual employee’s core aspirations and values
- Ask ‘Who do you look at and say, “I want to be her someday?”’
work together to align employee, manager, and company
- collaborative, rather than top-down exercise

The process for alignment can be a long one, so advice for managers:

define values in a group
define personal values one-on-one
build trust by opening up

Chapter 4: Implementing Transformational Tours of Duty

Tactics and techniques for using the framework

Both manager and employee have an explicit (albeit nonbinding) agreement with shared objectives and realistic expectations. This agreement provides the criteria for regular, mutual performance measurement and management.

Start the Conversation and Define the Mission

Every employee gets hired for a rotational or transformational tour.

what is the objective of the tour?
what do results of a successful tour of duty look like for the company? for the employee? how will the employee transform and be transformed by this tour?

Set Up a System of Regular Checkpoints for Both Sides to Exchange Feedback with Each Other
Before a Tour of Duty Draws to a Close, Begin Defining the Next Tour of Duty
- define a new tour within the company, or plan a transition as the employee will pursue a tour at a different company
Managing for the Unexpected: When There’s a Change in the Middle of a Tour
- what happens if one party breaks the alliance? breaking an alliance part way through should be seen as a breach of ethics, as the betrayal of a relationship if either party does it.

Advice for managers having the conversation:

mold the conversation to the type of tour
be sensitive to power imbalances
choose metrics that are leading indicators
apply moral suasion ethically
regularly check in on how the tour is evolving
establish a basis for trust through openness and transparency
assure your employees that you’re not about to fire them

Also, remember some tactical advice:

be structured
share the agenda in advance
be as concrete and specific as possible

Chapter 5: Employee Network Intelligence

Bringing the world into your company

Old employment model encouraged everyone to look inward when problem solving, to convene the smartest people in the office to solve particular problems.

Bill Gates quote:

“The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”

An individual career accelerates with the strength of their network.

Network intelligence and the associated willingness to seek help from people outside the company is one of the key factors in the success of Silicon Valley.

Network intelligence has several functions:

connect a company with outside info sources
provide access to “hidden data” – knowledge that isn’t publicly available
generate serendipity, which is a major driver of innovation, as most innovation is an application of existing tech to a new problem
help you see opportunities you would have otherwise missed

Chapter 6: Implementing Network Intelligence Programs

Tactics and techniques for investing in employee networks

recruit connected people
teach employees how to mine intelligence from their networks via conversations and social media
roll out programs and policies that help employees build their individual networks
- encourage employees to be active on social media and make themselves discoverable in a professional context by pushing their brands and building thought leadership
- set up a “networking fund” for employees so employees can expense lunches with interesting people or conference attendance
- facilitate speaking gigs for employees in order to establish them as thought leaders in the industry
- host events at your company office to increase exposure
have employees share what they learn with the company
- lunch in learn or brown bag lunches to share info

Advice for managers who want to talk to employees about network intelligence:

make the case for why network intelligence is important for employer and employee
personally explain the company’s programs
model proper usage of individual networks
ask every employee to furnish a list of the smartest people he knows who do not work at the company

Chapter 7: Corporate Alumni Networks

The mutual benefits of a lifelong alliance

Establishing a corporate alumni network, which requires relatively little investment, is the next logical step in maintaining a relationship of mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit in an era where lifetime employment is no longer the norm.

A company should clearly articulate the bidirectional value both parties get from the continuing relationship. Professional service firms and colleges and universities provide a good model on how these networks can be created and maintained.

Four Reasons to Invest in an Alumni Network

alumni networks help you hire great people
- makes it easier to hire “boomerang” people who come back after short leave of absence
- helps in referrals
alumni provide useful information
- great sources of network intelligence, competitive information, etc.
alumni refer customers
- alumni can refer customers or become them
alumni are brand ambassadors
- cheaper than advertising indirectly

Three Levels of Investment in Alumni Networks

ignore
support
invest

Chapter 8: Implementing an Alumni Network

Tactics and techniques for setting up a corporate alumni network

decide who you want to include in your alumni network
- should participation be broad, or more selective? should it be “distinguished” or every ex-employee?
explicitly define the expectations and benefits of the relationship
- what are the programs? e.g. referral bonuses, product discounts and whitelist access, hosted events, official recognition for selected alumni, information for alumni
establish a comprehensive exit process
- how do you maintain contact with departing employee after they leave (exit interview)?
build links between current employees and alumni
- Senior managers should set up formal programs and processes for tapping alumni intelligence before the need for their contribution arises.

Advice for managers having the conversation about setting up an alumni network:

use the alumni network as a selling point during the hiring process
make it easy and obvious for current employees to tap the alumni network for network intelligence
reinforce the career-long nature of the alliance upon exit

Book Notes

Why I read this book

Ruben Harris (founder of Career Karma) mentioned this on the Software Engineering Daily podcast, among a few other books, so I added most of the books to the backlog. This one was short enough to be picked up in a bit of downtime between some other, longer books.

One key takeaway

The era of lifetime employment is over, giving way to a free-agency style interaction between employees and employers, a transactional relationship that prioritizes instant gratification over long-term dedication and planning, to no one’s benefit. This book posits an ‘alliance’, a model already taking over Silicon Valley, where employee and employer mutually invest in each other and define clearly the terms of their mutually beneficial relationship.

Summary

The book is broken up into four general parts:

defining tours of duty
defining and aligning on interests and goals
building network intelligence
creating and leveraging an alumni network

Most every chapter ends with “advice to the manager” for implementing the theme of the chapter.

How was the book

It’s hard to tell who this book is for: the entrepreneurial founder to be, looking to create a talent pool, the manager looking to establish an honest and open and mutually beneficial relationship with employees, or the employee, looking to maximize their input on a team. I suspect those markets are probably too small on their own to justify the publication cost. The book certainly can certainly count brevity amongst its cardinal virtues; you can put it away in under 3 hours unless you insist on taking notes.

I like to play a game with any business book, which is, to reduce it to a sentence or key takeaway, and see how much is lost. Maybe in the future I’ll have a more clever name for that heuristic, but for now, it applies with this book. Reading a synopsis and a few bullet points essentially encompasses all there is to be gained here. Not every pamphlet needs a book, although the career heft of the authors seems to compel a listen. The recipe is simple enough: found a start-up, live in the Silicon Valley bubble and spend every waking hour networking or blogging or learning or improving your brand, and you will reach career enlightenment. We need separate careers to maintain our first career relevancy.

Any other reading

Both mentioned in the podcast above, the first by the same authors as The Alliance.

The Startup of You
The Starfish and the Spider