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There will come a time when your brightest, most beloved employee will want to leave. Reid Hoffman says you should let her go—or at least, in many instances. On July 8, the king of social networks himself, who founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook, will publish a radical book of advice for managers called The Alliance, and it’s worth a read. A follow-up to his 2011 blockbuster The Start-Up of You, this instructional manual makes a strong case that managers should rethink the very essence of the relationships they strike with employees. Along with co-writers Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh, Hoffman argues that no one goes to work for one company forever anymore, and that managers shouldn’t pretend they do. Instead, employees and employers should agree upon short increments of work to accomplish together much like a military tour of duty. Once the work is complete, they should meet to reevaluate what happens next. I recently sat down with Hoffman, who joined the prominent Silicon Valley VC firm Greylock Partners in 2009, to discuss how his ideas translate into practice. Below, our conversation (edited for clarity):
總有一天，你最聰明、最喜愛的員工想離開公司。而對此雷德o霍夫曼說，你應該讓他們走——或者說，至少在大部分情況下，你都應該放他們走。雷德o霍夫曼本身是社交網絡之王，他創辦了社交網絡LinkedIn，同時還是社交服務網站Facebook的早期投資人。今年7月8日，霍夫曼將出版一本新書，為管理者提供建議。新書名為《同盟》（The Alliance），里面的觀點十分激進，值得一讀。2011年霍夫曼出版的《至關重要的關系》（The Start-Up of You）一書取得了極大成功，而《同盟》則是這本書的后續。作為一本指導手冊，它給了管理者充分的理由，讓他們重新思考管理者與員工關系的實質。霍夫曼與另兩名聯合作者本 o 卡斯諾瓦和克里斯o葉一起提出了一個事實：現在已經沒有人會在一家公司一直干到底了，管理者們應該承認現實。與此相反，員工與雇主應該達成協議，將共同努力推進工作看作是在軍隊完成一次服役。一旦服役期結束，他們就該坐下來重新討論之后的安排。2009年，霍夫曼加入了一家卓越的硅谷風險投資公司Greylock。最近我得以與他會面，討論應該如何將他的想法付諸實踐。下面是我們的談話內容（為清晰起見，談話內容經過編輯）：
You discuss thinking about increments of work as tours of duty, a term you take from the military. How do you convey that to employees?
你說到應該把共同推進工作的過程看作一段“服役期”，這是一個部隊里的一個術語，該怎么跟員工說明這一點呢？
You should actually have conversations with your employees to say, what would your dream job be, whether it’s here or somewhere else? How do we align our interests where it’s working for both of us that you are on your path?
實際上，你應該在與員工交談時問他們：你夢想中的工作是什么？是在我們公司還是在別的地方？我們應該如何平衡雙方的利益，使結果既對雙方有好處，又不耽誤你達成目標？
That’s easy when an employee arrives knowing what she wants to do, but very often people don’t. They arrive wanting a job.
如果員工有自己的目標，談起來就會很容易。但大部分員工都沒有自己的目標，他們只是想找一份工作。
They want a job and they want success. They want some notion of, “I’m making progress.” You want to align that instinct to things that are very helpful to the company. The classic thing for decades was: Be a good company person. And sometimes it plays out that way. But what you want to do is say, we are much happier when you’ve made a huge amount of progress. If the consequence is you stay at the company, that’s okay. And if the consequence is, you move on, that’s okay too. We want to make that all very healthy.
他們只是想要一份工作，然后在工作中獲得成功。他們想要感到“我正在進步”。你應該讓員工做對公司有益的工作，同時讓他們感到自己一直在進步。過去幾十年的傳統是：讓員工好好忠于公司。有些時候，這會帶來好的結果。但你真正該做的是告訴員工：如果你取得巨大成功，我們會更加高興。如果這樣的結果是你還繼續留在公司，那很好；如果你最終離開了公司，那也沒問題——我們想創建的是非常健康的關系。
So you’re encouraging potentially talented people to leave?
如此說來，你是在鼓勵有潛力的人才離開公司嗎？
If that’s what’s right for them. One consequence: companies are generating a lot more young alumni than they used to have. It used to be that alumni were 65 and played golf. Now you have alumni who worked here from age 25 to 30 and are now doing other things. How do you stay engaged with those alumni and how is that helpful to you?
如果這樣對他們好的話，是的。這么做的一個結果是，相比以往，公司會擁有越來越多的、年紀較輕的前成員。之前的狀況是，公司前員工都在65歲或以上，只能打打高爾夫球。而現在，25到30歲的年輕人從公司離開后，還會去其它地方工作。他們都是公司的前成員，應該怎樣跟他們保持聯絡，使這一點有助于你呢？
You talked about John Donahoe and eBay as a good example. How did that work and what have the results been like?
你談到了約翰o多納霍和他的購物網站eBay，它就是個很好的例子。他們是怎么做的呢？取得了什么樣的成果？
The eBay alumni network runs a set of services—the most prominent is events—where they invite alumni back to the events to keep a relationship going with the company. You never build a relationship with a “give me something.” You just build the relationship and good things come out of them. I think they have alumni referring new employees. They’ve gotten intelligence about how technology is evolving and how eBay should react. They’ve hosted a dinner with some of the Paypal folks, for example, to say, how do you think Paypal should evolve? Where are payments going?
eBay會為前成員群體提供一整套服務，其中最突出的是社交活動——公司會邀請前成員回來參加活動，以保持與他們的關系。用“索取”的方式是無法建立良好關系的。你應該先建立好關系，之后再自然而然地受益。我想，他們可能還讓前員工給他們推薦了新員工。他們獲得了許多情報，了解了技術的最新發展，知道公司該如何作出反應。他們還與在線支付網站貝寶（PayPal）的一些員工舉行晚餐會，討論各種問題，比如：你認為貝寶應該怎樣發展？付款方式會如何變化？
You talk about attempting to codify the relationships that people in your organization have with outsiders. You give some examples of that. How does this work at Greylock?
你說到，你正試圖就公司員工與外部人員的關系撰寫一本新書，也給出了一些這方面的例子。那么，Greylock是怎么實踐這一點的呢？
We publicize in a huddle on Monday morning, who are all the different people that folks are meeting with this week? Then [if there's a relevant fact or relationship to bring up] people say, “This would be something useful for you to know.”
我們會在周一早上舉行集體會議，問大家這周都跟哪些人見過面。然后（如果有值得提出的相關事實或關系），他們就會提出來：“這件事可能會對你有用”。
There’s a constant pressure on workers to prepare themselves for the jobs of the future without abandoning the jobs they have; at the same time, because they stay in jobs for shorter periods, they often have less opportunity for professional development. How do people prepare?
員工們往往面臨著一種持續性的壓力，需要在不放棄現有工作的同時為未來工作做準備。同時，由于他們從事某一份工作的時間變短了，想取得專業進步的機會也就更少。他們應該如何做好準備？
In terms of professional skills it’s no longer useful to think about the industrial model. I train and train andthen I am ready. Rather, it’s like agile programming—continual adaptation. There are two forms of continual adaptation. The first is picking up intelligence on the job. [And that can happen in lots of ways.] For example, you can expense a lunch meeting and bring intelligence back to the organization. The second way skills retraining happens is in more bite-size chunks that occur in a much more adaptive and ongoing way. Instead of, say, going to business school and returning, [employees can learn] in conferences and briefings…. Two-week classes, for example. You can easily see professional certifications happening via remote learning over the Internet.
在專業技能方面，工業模式已經不管用了。以前的情況是，通過反復培訓，幫助員工做好準備。而現在則更像敏捷編程，是一種不斷的適應過程。不斷適應的形式有兩種，一種是不斷獲取有關未來工作的情報（在這一點上也有許多不同的方法）。例如，可以請別人共進午餐，同時把情報帶回公司。第二種技能培訓的方式則是更小塊的學習，更具有適應性和持續性。與進入商學院學習不同，（員工們可以）在各種大型會議和簡短會議中學習……還可以參加為期兩周的輔導班。大家會看到，通過網絡遠程學習，很多人都能獲得專業證書。
Why did you write this book?
你們為什么要寫這本書？
There’s an underlying broken notion in thinking about how an employer and an employee relate to each other. The breakage goes to two factors. One is, “well we’re still doing the lifetime employment of all the people we like”—wink, wink, nudge, nudge. In that conversation, the company and employee are lying to each other. Both know that’s not the modern world. We’ve swung to the opposite extreme of one-day employment contracts, where either side is ready and willing to cut off the relationship whenever convenient. The lack of trust hinders innovation and long-term collaboration.
在雇主與員工的關系上，某種根本性的概念已經破碎了。這種破碎體現在兩個方面。雖然人們嘴上說，“我們還會為所有的好員工提供終身雇傭制”，同時又互相使眼色，生怕說漏了嘴。在這類談話中，公司和員工都在撒謊，其實雙方都知道時代已經不一樣了。一日制雇傭合同里，雙方會隨時準備好，并且愿意在合適的時機終止雇傭關系。而現在，我們走向了這種關系的另一個極端。信任的缺失阻礙了創新和長期的合作。
What do you want people to take away from it?
你們希望人們從這本書里學到什么？
Part of living in the networked age is there are always a bunch more smart people that you don’t know than you do know. The question is, as a manager, how do you navigate your group to take advantage of that fact. One trade-off of having some people move on is good: bringing in new blood. That brings in a whole raft of new information, network access, changes in what’s going on. It’s also good to have people you have good relationships with go to other places because when the relationship continues, that becomes an intelligence stream back.
生活在互聯網時代，你會發現，你不認識的聰明人總比你認識的多得多。問題是，作為一名管理者，你該如何管理團隊，以便好好利用這一點？放手讓一部分人也有一個補償，因為你可以引進新鮮血液。它能帶來大量最新信息、新的人脈資源和外界的最新動態。讓與你有著良好關系的前員工進入其它公司也有好處：如果這種良好關系能夠持續，它就會反過來給你提供情報。
The career, then, is a combination or products, not a series of titles. People have this model of thinking about the progression of careers as a ladder of titles. That ladder of titles now means a lot less. What actually matters is a sequence of projects. The Alliancesays, here is a way you can manage groups and people on sequences or projects where you can accomplish great things.So what as a manager can you do for your employees? You can’t guarantee them lifetime employment, but you can give them lifetime employability. That’s when you have been awesome to your people.
因此，職業道路是一種產品的組合，而不是一系列的頭銜。擁有后一種思維模式的人將職業發展看成頭銜的階梯。這個階梯的意義現在已經大大降低了——真正有意義的是一系列的項目。《同盟》這本書給出了一種新方法，讓你能夠以系列項目的形式管理團隊和人員，并因此獲得巨大成功。而作為一名管理者，你能為員工做到什么呢？你無法給他們終身雇傭的保證，但可以幫助他們發展終身就業的技能。做到這一點才是真正對員工好。
