The employer-employee relationship is broken. Managers face a seemingly impossible dilemma: You can’t afford to offer lifetime employment. But you can’t build a lasting, innovative business when everyone acts like a free agent. The solution: Stop thinking of employees as family or free agents, and start thinking of them as allies on a tour of duty. Co-authored by Reid Hoffman, founder/chairman of LinkedIn, and Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh, The Alliance teaches managers how to recruit, manage, and retain the entrepreneurial employees your business needs to succeed in the networked age. This deck is a visual summary of our book: http://amzn.to/1kWQB4j The "tour of duty" is the way you organize the Alliance at work. In this context, a tour of duty represents a commitment by employer and employee to a specific mission of finite duration. We see this approach as a way to incorporate some of the advantages from both lifetime employment and free agency. Like lifetime employment, the tour of duty allows employers and employees to build trust and mutual investment; like free agency, it preserves the flexibility that both employers and employees need to adapt to a rapidly changing world.