W14 - Alliance

When I first started working after graduation, China was in the midst of the “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” wave, coinciding with the peak of the “PayPal Mafia” cultural export. Several core members published many bestselling startup books in quick succession—titles like Zero to One, The Alliance, and The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I remember skimming them back then and feeling lost; my interest fizzled quickly. It felt like trying to study design patterns before I had ever written code. I recently picked up The Alliance again and, with more experience, understood it far better.

Since the turn of the 21st century, the world has shifted decisively from lifetime employment toward more flexible employment models. The Alliance reframes the organizational and managerial challenges this shift brings, sharing some practical approaches from Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t fully explain why this shift occurred—what made lifetime employment become the old paradigm.

Our generation still has some firsthand sense of lifetime employment. Many of our parents’ careers followed that model: companies and employees resembled arranged marriages, each providing for the other. Companies offered lifelong jobs; employees offered loyal service. My father started working right after high school and devoted nearly 40 years to the same position until retirement. I struggle to understand it, but he saw it as natural.

The rise of flexible employment can push employer–employee relationships into a trap: commodification. When both sides focus on short-term, price-driven exchanges, they ignore the fundamental factor of productivity—people—which is a lose–lose approach. The Alliance reiterates the importance of long-term relationships and argues that even under flexible employment, organizations must invest in long-term ties. Employers and employees should form an “alliance”: an equitable, reciprocal relationship in which the company helps employees build careers and employees help the company succeed. This approach preserves adaptability while enabling long-term investment, combining the strengths of both lifetime and flexible employment models.

Practically, the book proposes designing a series of successive, concrete terms to progressively advance the alliance: a rotation period, a transformation period, and finally a foundational period. It addresses how to handle situations during the rotation and transformation phases when an employee wants to develop a personal brand that diverges from the employer’s goals and values. The guiding principle is essentially “agree to disagree”: acknowledge differences while pursuing common ground. Even such a simple truth is hard for me to uphold consistently in daily work; I often find myself overlooking differences and forcing conformity.

In the book’s second half the author covers two themes: investing in helping employees expand their networks to gather information, and creating and managing alumni networks. To be frank, I was struck when the author repeatedly emphasized that these factors are crucial to Silicon Valley’s success. They are the fruits of an outward-facing mindset and a long-term orientation. Perhaps due to cultural or structural differences, domestic companies have noticeably weakened these practices in their C2C processes.