I’m delighted to share the news that I’m co-author of a new book called The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, coming out on July 8th from Harvard Business Review Press.
A year ago, we published an article in Harvard Business Review titled Tours of Duty, which attracted a decent amount of attention. The book builds on those themes, with significantly more nuance, especially around the concept of the tour of duty. We show how you can reclaim the loyalty and trust in the workplace that’s been lost over the past 50 years by designing an employer-employee relationship that emphasizes mutual trust, mutual benefit, mutual investment. With honest conversation about what each side wants out of the employment relationship, employees are able to do their best, most innovative work, and companies are able to retain them for a meaningful period of time.
In one sense, the new book is an evolution from The Start-Up of You, which Reid and I published about two years ago. That book was for individuals. We argued that individuals can and must think of themselves as entrepreneurs, deploying a full range of entrepreneurial skills in their career, even if they work at someone else’s company. The Alliance is for managers. All managers, to be sure, but especially those who are keen on recruiting, managing, and retaining the kinds of flexible, creative, adaptive employees who’ve been reading The Start-Up of You.
As with the HBR article, Reid and I teamed up with my longtime partner-in-crime Chris Yeh to co-author the book. It’s a ton of work to conceive, write, edit, publish, and market a book. Over the past year and a half, I’ve had the uncommon pleasure of being able to partner with two of my closest friends at once during this long journey.
I’ve already spoken about The Alliance to corporate audiences. Based on those experiences, the reaction to the article, and early feedback on the book, I believe The Alliance has the potential to be a big idea in talent management.
If you manage people — or want to better understand how your managers should be managing you — please pre-order The Alliance!
Congrats on the new book! On point and timely as usual.
As a freelancer, I can’t imagine a scenario in which I would go back to working full-time unless it was completely out of necessity – and in that case I can’t imagine that I would make a great employee.
The notion of a “tour of duty” sounds much more interesting – and really like a longer term project with one client. I would love to work in this way because not only would it give me the peace of mind of not having to be constantly looking for the next project, it would allow me to focus my energy for deeper and more meaningful work, which could be much more impactful than a surface-scratching “contractor” engagement.
I have a feeling this is going to be HUGE… much needed idea that nobody has been able to talk straight at until now.
Awesome!
Pre-ordered a copy. Looking forward to it! It’s good to see you and Chris collaborating again, too.
i like this book. i will buy it.
My hearty congratulations for you and i hope it will be great success. Hope i can get one copy soon.
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