W14 - Alliance

When I first started working after graduation, China was in the midst of a major "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" movement, and the cultural export of the "PayPal Mafia" was at its peak. Several core members published many bestselling entrepreneurial books in quick succession, like Zero to One, The Alliance, and The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I remember skimming them back then out of curiosity but understanding little; my interest quickly waned. It was like trying to read design patterns before writing any code. Recently I picked up The Alliance again and found my comprehension has improved considerably.

Since the turn of the 21st century, the world has been transitioning rapidly from lifetime employment to freelance-style employment. The Alliance reframes the organizational and managerial challenges this shift brings and shares some practical approaches from Silicon Valley. What the book regrettably does not fully explain is why the world changed this way — what caused lifetime employment to become the tradition.

Our generation still has some firsthand sense of lifetime employment. Many of our parents worked like that: companies and employees resembled a marriage, each committing to the other. Companies provided lifelong jobs; employees provided loyal service. My father started working after high school and stayed in the same position until his imminent retirement, dedicating nearly 40 years to it. I still find that hard to comprehend; to him it seemed natural.

The rise of freelance employment can easily push company-employee relationships into a misleading place: commodification. Both sides engage in short-sighted, price-driven exchanges and overlook the fundamental factor of productivity — people. That's a lose-lose management approach. The Alliance reiterates the importance of long-term relationships and argues that even under a freelance model, companies must invest in long-term ties. Companies and employees should form an "alliance": a reciprocal, equal relationship. The company helps employees build their careers; employees help the company succeed. This approach preserves adaptability while enabling investment in the long run, combining the strengths of both lifetime and freelance employment.

In practice, the book recommends designing a series of discrete, consecutive terms to progressively advance the alliance: a rotation period, a transformation period, and finally a stable base period. During rotation and transformation, if an employee seeks to build a personal brand that diverges from the employer’s goals and values, how should that be handled? The guiding idea is "agree on the important things, tolerate the rest": acknowledge differences while pursuing common ground. Yet even this simple principle is hard for me to uphold consistently in daily work; I often fall into the habit of ignoring differences and enforcing conformity.

The latter part of the book covers two themes: investing in expanding employees’ networks for intelligence and creating and operating networks of former employees. Frankly, the author’s repeated emphasis that these are critical success factors in Silicon Valley had a strong impact on me. They are the fruits of outward-facing thinking and long-term practice. Perhaps due to cultural differences, this aspect is noticeably weaker in Chinese companies during their C2C processes.