The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh

Improving the microcosm of workplace relationships can have a major impact on society -- job by job, team by team, company by company. The alliance may seem like a small thing next to macroeconomic proposals like overhauling the education system or reforming our regulatory regime, but it's a small thing we can all adopt today that will generate big cumulative returns in the years to come.

Review of the new book by  The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh:

The Alliance shows how the workplace has changed in recent decades, and how these changes have broken down the trust in the relationship between employers and employees, to everyone's detriment. And then it shows a way forward so that all benefit.

Essentially, the authors write, we've gone from a model predicated on stable, longtime (if not lifetime) employment to one of constant flux and change. "The world changed, both philosophically and technologically," they write. "The rise of shareholder capitalism led companies and managers to focus on hitting short-term financial targets to boost stock prices."

As a result, the employer-employee relationship has become legalistic and transactional, characterized by mutual distrust and "based on a dishonest conversation." Employers still talk about the value of talent retention and use the language of "family" and "team," but when short-term and quarterly expectations aren't met, employees suddenly find themselves without a family, cut from the team. Since employees know this, they're -- not unreasonably -- always looking for a better gig and not fully committing to what they're doing now. "No one wants to risk being jilted," the authors write, "so no one invests in the long-term relationship."

When no one wants to make that investment, it's bad for everybody, including companies. And this isn't good for anyone:

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.