Notes on The Alliance by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh

A long time ago, a recruiter friend recommended to me the book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh, and I recently finally got around to reading it. I enjoyed Reid's other book The Startup of You, and this one was great too.

It proposed a different framework for the employer/employee relationship and used a military analogy of a "tour of duty" to represent a more balanced relationship and perspective, in which the employee can have a significant positive impact while also growing in their career. I liked the concrete advice in the book on how to structure and agree on the details of these tours, as well as other advice, such as nurturing corporate alumni networks.

Below are my main notes and takeaways. This is a great book for any founder or manager.

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1 employment in the networked age
Rebuilding trust and loyalty through alliance
Moving from family to team
Founder mindset
Entrepreneurial contributions from employees

2 tours of duty
Tour between 2-4 years to grow and achieve tangible results
Building trust through honest conversations 
Acknowledge that employee might leave
Opt in culture
Different types of tours
Rotation 
Structured program for entry level
Employee can be swapped
Transformational
Personalized to employee and with specific end goal
2-5 years
Foundational
Closely aligned employee and company
Employee mission is the company
Founders
Decade long
Senior management

3 building alignment in a tour of duty
Establish company values
Learn employee values
Work together to align company and employee
“What’s a recent costume you wore?”

4 implementing transformational tours of duty
Need honest two way feedback
Define the mission
Results of success for company and for employee 
System of regular checkpoints
Define next tour of duty before first ends
Succession planning for project
Transition checklist
Alliance statement written

5 employee network intelligence
Hidden data

6 implementing network intelligence programs
Recruit connected people
Teach employees to leverage networks
Encourage employees to build networks
Pay for employees to have networking lunches 
Have employees share lessons learned
Have each employee list best 3 people the worked with before 

7 corporate alumni networks
Boomerang employees
Helps with recruiting and network intelligence
Referral incentive programs for customers
Brand ambassadors
Alumni reunions
Invest in alumni

8 implementing an alumni network
Decide who to include
Define expectations 
Employee discounts
Hosted events
Keep alumni informed
Exit process to alumni
Market alumni to employees

Conclusion

Appendix a sample statement of alliance

Appendix b mission alignment exercise

Appendix c getting started at your company