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The Alliance: Managing Talent In The Networked Age (2014)

by Reid Hoffman(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1625275773 (ISBN13: 9781625275776)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Harvard Business Review Press

review 1: I think with a book like this, if you come away with one or two good actionable ideas, the book would deserve a 5-star rating. Even if you just get a new perspective or food for thought, the book is worthwhile. I admit I'm not in the target audience for this book, and so my rather tepid 2-star rating. The authors present two or three core ideas: "tours of duty" replacing the lifetime employment mythology, encourage and plan for networking, and utilize alumni networks.Sometimes the book seems like one long advertisement for LinkedIn, but I think that would be an unfair characterization. The principal author Reid Hoffman writes about what he knows, and as the cofounder and chairman of LinkedIn, the LinkedIn approach is what he knows. If this were written by Steve Ballmer, mo... morest of the examples would come from Microsoft. That said, I did get kind of tired of the frequent LinkedIn references.A few small annoyances: The authors follow the current fad of using the pronoun "she" when they are referring to a non-specific person, e.g., "a manager." That gets confusing to those of us who learned that "he" is the pronoun to use for a generic person. "He" is either gender-neutral or may refer to a male person, depending on the situation. "She" always refers to a female. The feminist agenda has made our language more confusing.At the end of the book, the authors say that they "encountered numerous topics that [they] found fascinating, but that [they] simply couldn't fit into the book." Since the book is a scant 172 pages, and small pages at that, I thought that statement was a little weak.On the positive side, there is a supplemental website (thealliancenetwork.com) that readers can go to for a deeper treatment of some of the topics they cover.I suspect some readers will find The Alliance presentation quite valuable. Since the book is short, it won't take long to find out if you are one of those readers.
review 2: In the past forty years, the relationship between employers and employees has changed. Lifetime employment has become a thing of the past while talent is now expected to hop from job to job. While this state of affairs offers unprecedented labor mobility, it also reduces trust. Employers don't invest in their employees as much because they don't want to waste resources on people that won't stay. Employees aren't loyal to their companies because they feel that they are expendable.It is this lack of trust that "The Alliance" seeks to alleviate through a simple brilliant idea: employers and employees should be honest about the transitory nature of jobs and look at them as "Tours of Duty" where an employer gets something concrete accomplished for the company while the employee gets an experience that will help them develop their careers. In short, employer and employee form an alliance. Through this experience, everyone gets what they want, and on top of that, everyone is left happier.It's a brilliant idea that seems highly relevant to American society. This book is worth reading just to get a good understanding of this simple idea. Unfortunately, there isn't all that much other than this idea in the book. It feels like it could have been published as a Kindle Single. Overall, an excellent, if quick, read. less

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