The best talent is hard to find and harder to keep. Top performers are snatched up in competitive bids that look like the NFL draft while new grads struggle to kickstart their careers. How can companies attract, manage, and retain the best talent? How can job seekers optimize for the entire arc of their career in every step along the way?
Chris Yeh is a coauthor of The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Network Age (with Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha). Chris is a seasoned writer and entrepreneur and works with tech companies around Silicon Valley. The Alliance draws heavily from Reid’s experience as a cofounder of LinkedIn and reframes the entire social contract between employer and employee. Chris generously agreed to walk us through what that means for companies and folks on the job market.
Here are some of the questions we tackle:
- How is the employer/employee relationship different today than it was 50 years ago?
- What’s the biggest mistake employers make?
- What was the most counter-intuitive thing you, Ben, and Reid learned writing The Alliance?
- What new talent management tools are best suited to this new world?
- How should employees think about their own careers? What kind of alliance can they form with their managers?
- What’s your creative process like behind-the-scenes? How is collaborative writing similar or different than solo?
- Why should busy people make time to read literature? What is the value of fiction?
- Are their any novels you recommend to entrepreneurs?
- What crossovers have you discovered between your work as a writer/entrepreneur/investor? Any tips for writers/artists who want to make a living with their work?
- What does it mean to focus on off-the-radar deals?
- With so many balls in the air, how do you achieve work/life balance?
Links and mentions from the interview:
- The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder.
- Lois McMaster Bujold‘s science fiction books.
- The Inner Light episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
- Chris’s homepage.
- Chris on Twitter.
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