Home > Work > The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
1 " A few of the managers we spoke with for this book worried that the tour of duty framework might give employees "permission" to leave. But permission is not yours to give or to withhold, and believing you have that power is simply a self-deception that leads to a dishonest relationship with your employees. Employees don't need your permission to switch companies, and if you try to assert that right, they'll simply make their move behind your back. "
― Reid Hoffman , The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
2 " Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. "
3 " Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours. "
4 " Psychologist Arthur Aron of SUNY Stony Brook discovered that asking participants in an experiment to share their deepest feelings and beliefs for a single hour could generate the same sense of trust and intimacy that typically takes weeks, months, or years to form. "
5 " Employee networks are extremely valuable to companies as a source of information. As Bill Gates wrote more than a decade ago, “The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”1 "
6 " These stewards of the company way are the intellectual and emotional foundation of the organization. "
7 " The most entrepreneurial employees want to establish “personal brands” that stand apart from their employers’. It’s a rational, necessary response to the end of lifetime employment. "
8 " Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”5 "
9 " Think of a Foundational tour as a form of marriage—a long-term relationship that both parties anticipate will be permanent, in which both parties assume a moral obligation to try hard to make it work before ending the relationship. "
10 " 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. "
11 " In this sense, a business is far more like a sports team than a family. "
12 " Entrepreneurial employees possess what eBay CEO John Donahoe calls the founder mind-set. As he put it to us, “People with the founder mind-set drive change, motivate people, and just get stuff done. "
13 " Unlike John Lasseter’s bosses at Disney, Bezos was open to the entrepreneurial contributions of Amazon’s individual employees—even when those ideas were outside what Wall Street (and even his own board of directors) considered the company’s core business. AWS represents precisely the kind of value creation any CEO or shareholder would want from their employees. Want your employees to come up with multibillion-dollar ideas while on the job? You have to attract professionals with the founder mind-set and then harness their entrepreneurial impulses for your company. As Intuit CEO Brad Smith told us, “A leader’s job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow. "
14 " more on this in chapters 7 and 8.) Getting Value from Entrepreneurial Talent We three authors come from a business environment where the employment alliance "
15 " A leader’s job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow. "
16 " Teams win when their individual members trust each other enough to prioritize team success over individual glory; paradoxically, winning as a team is the best way for the team members to achieve individual success. "
17 " As much as companies might yearn for a stable environment and employees might yearn for lifetime employment, the world has irrevocably changed. But we also can’t keep going the way we’ve been going. Trust in the business world (as measured by the proportion of employees who say they have a “high level of trust in management and the organization” they work for) is near an all-time low.6 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. "
18 " If your company lacks meaningful official values, take the liberty of defining those values for your team. "
19 " When he thought about how he wanted to build his career coming out of college, Hahn took inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”5 "
20 " What Do the Results of a Successful Tour of Duty Look Like for the Company? A successful mission objective delivers results for the company for either quantitative or qualitative goals, such as launching a new product line and generating a certain dollar amount in first-year revenues, or achieving thought leadership in a specific market category, as measured by the writings of industry analysts. At LinkedIn, for example, managers ask, “How will the company be transformed by this employee?” What Do the Results of "
