Chris Yeh

Good ideas in this book, but somewhat weakened by the inability for anyone in middle/lower management to enact the good ideas presented.

If I was starting a company or worked in a small company that was open to changing how people are treated/managed, I'd highly recommend this book.

Working at a large company where the policies are already in place and change is not likely, this book may prove to be more frustrating than helpful. Not that the ideas can't scale, it is just too many people are entrenched in the status quo and won't consider making some of the changes recommended in the book.… (more)

The Alliance describes the cycle of the relationship between employees and their company from their first days to their afterlife in a company alumni network. It is up to the reader to decide if this is a method that they can initiate and maintain at their company, or to negotiate an alliance with their employer.

Prior to the release of The Alliance, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, with his co-authors, presented their ideas about “tours of duty” within a company (http://hbr.org/2013/06/tours-of-duty-the-new-employer-employee-compact). In the book, the author’s describe 3 types of tours of duty: rotational, transformational and foundational. The rotational type is familiar to many organizations as “...a structured program of finite duration, usually aimed at entry-level employees” (p. 29). The second type, transformational, is an expressly planned win/win employee-employer contract: the employer gets a project, program or product initialized and possibly completed, while the employee completes their tour of duty by developing a professional skills set. The employee either moves on to a new tour of duty in the company or moves into the next phase of their career at a new company or into self-employment. The final type, foundational, is one where the employee becomes a pillar of the company and the “employee sees his life’s work as the company’s mission and vice versa” (p. 33). These categorizations might be helpful for an employee who wants to determine their place in their company or identify where they are in their life cycle with the company, and it may also be useful to define the work of the employee in the company’s own life cycle.

The Alliance also looks at the role of networking and maintaining alliances with company alumni for relationship building and acquiring competitive intelligence. According to LinkedIn, which “...now hosts over 118,000 corporate alumni groups, including 98 percent of the Fortune 500” (p. 129) many of these groups are managed on LinkedIn without the blessing of the company where the alumni hail from. The authors suggest that by leaving these groups entirely to their own devices, these companies are cutting themselves off from valuable intelligence and relationships, as well as a supply of boomerangs who could fill positions in the company, especially if they left in good standing and have achieved more skills and knowledge while they worked in other areas. For some companies that are having recruitment problems, or who feel that they could expand, tapping into the alumni network could be valuable.

For readers who liked Never Eat Lunch Alone or who are trying to explore the “gig” economy, The Alliance offers a description of some of the forces at work while also reiterating the value of networks and relationships.… (more)