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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):
总有一天，你最聪明、最喜爱的员工想离开公司。而对此雷德o霍夫曼说，你应该让他们走——或者说，至少在大部分情况下，你都应该放他们走。雷德o霍夫曼本身是社交网络之王，他创办了社交网络LinkedIn，同时还是社交服务网站Facebook的早期投资人。今年7月8日，霍夫曼将出版一本新书，为管理者提供建议。新书名为《同盟》（The Alliance），里面的观点十分激进，值得一读。2011年霍夫曼出版的《至关重要的关系》（The Start-Up of You）一书取得了极大成功，而《同盟》则是这本书的后续。作为一本指导手册，它给了管理者充分的理由，让他们重新思考管理者与员工关系的实质。霍夫曼与另两名联合作者本 o 卡斯诺瓦和克里斯o叶一起提出了一个事实：现在已经没有人会在一家公司一直干到底了，管理者们应该承认现实。与此相反，员工与雇主应该达成协议，将共同努力推进工作看作是在军队完成一次服役。一旦服役期结束，他们就该坐下来重新讨论之后的安排。2009年，霍夫曼加入了一家卓越的硅谷风险投资公司Greylock。最近我得以与他会面，讨论应该如何将他的想法付诸实践。下面是我们的谈话内容（为清晰起见，谈话内容经过编辑）：
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?
你说到应该把共同推进工作的过程看作一段“服役期”，这是一个部队里的一个术语，该怎么跟员工说明这一点呢？
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?
实际上，你应该在与员工交谈时问他们：你梦想中的工作是什么？是在我们公司还是在别的地方？我们应该如何平衡双方的利益，使结果既对双方有好处，又不耽误你达成目标？
That’s easy when an employee arrives knowing what she wants to do, but very often people don’t. They arrive wanting a job.
如果员工有自己的目标，谈起来就会很容易。但大部分员工都没有自己的目标，他们只是想找一份工作。
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.
他们只是想要一份工作，然后在工作中获得成功。他们想要感到“我正在进步”。你应该让员工做对公司有益的工作，同时让他们感到自己一直在进步。过去几十年的传统是：让员工好好忠于公司。有些时候，这会带来好的结果。但你真正该做的是告诉员工：如果你取得巨大成功，我们会更加高兴。如果这样的结果是你还继续留在公司，那很好；如果你最终离开了公司，那也没问题——我们想创建的是非常健康的关系。
So you’re encouraging potentially talented people to leave?
如此说来，你是在鼓励有潜力的人才离开公司吗？
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?
如果这样对他们好的话，是的。这么做的一个结果是，相比以往，公司会拥有越来越多的、年纪较轻的前成员。之前的状况是，公司前员工都在65岁或以上，只能打打高尔夫球。而现在，25到30岁的年轻人从公司离开后，还会去其它地方工作。他们都是公司的前成员，应该怎样跟他们保持联络，使这一点有助于你呢？
You talked about John Donahoe and eBay as a good example. How did that work and what have the results been like?
你谈到了约翰o多纳霍和他的购物网站eBay，它就是个很好的例子。他们是怎么做的呢？取得了什么样的成果？
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会为前成员群体提供一整套服务，其中最突出的是社交活动——公司会邀请前成员回来参加活动，以保持与他们的关系。用“索取”的方式是无法建立良好关系的。你应该先建立好关系，之后再自然而然地受益。我想，他们可能还让前员工给他们推荐了新员工。他们获得了许多情报，了解了技术的最新发展，知道公司该如何作出反应。他们还与在线支付网站贝宝（PayPal）的一些员工举行晚餐会，讨论各种问题，比如：你认为贝宝应该怎样发展？付款方式会如何变化？
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?
你说到，你正试图就公司员工与外部人员的关系撰写一本新书，也给出了一些这方面的例子。那么，Greylock是怎么实践这一点的呢？
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.”
我们会在周一早上举行集体会议，问大家这周都跟哪些人见过面。然后（如果有值得提出的相关事实或关系），他们就会提出来：“这件事可能会对你有用”。
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?
员工们往往面临着一种持续性的压力，需要在不放弃现有工作的同时为未来工作做准备。同时，由于他们从事某一份工作的时间变短了，想取得专业进步的机会也就更少。他们应该如何做好准备？
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.
在专业技能方面，工业模式已经不管用了。以前的情况是，通过反复培训，帮助员工做好准备。而现在则更像敏捷编程，是一种不断的适应过程。不断适应的形式有两种，一种是不断获取有关未来工作的情报（在这一点上也有许多不同的方法）。例如，可以请别人共进午餐，同时把情报带回公司。第二种技能培训的方式则是更小块的学习，更具有适应性和持续性。与进入商学院学习不同，（员工们可以）在各种大型会议和简短会议中学习……还可以参加为期两周的辅导班。大家会看到，通过网络远程学习，很多人都能获得专业证书。
Why did you write this book?
你们为什么要写这本书？
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.
在雇主与员工的关系上，某种根本性的概念已经破碎了。这种破碎体现在两个方面。虽然人们嘴上说，“我们还会为所有的好员工提供终身雇佣制”，同时又互相使眼色，生怕说漏了嘴。在这类谈话中，公司和员工都在撒谎，其实双方都知道时代已经不一样了。一日制雇佣合同里，双方会随时准备好，并且愿意在合适的时机终止雇佣关系。而现在，我们走向了这种关系的另一个极端。信任的缺失阻碍了创新和长期的合作。
What do you want people to take away from it?
你们希望人们从这本书里学到什么？
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.
生活在互联网时代，你会发现，你不认识的聪明人总比你认识的多得多。问题是，作为一名管理者，你该如何管理团队，以便好好利用这一点？放手让一部分人也有一个补偿，因为你可以引进新鲜血液。它能带来大量最新信息、新的人脉资源和外界的最新动态。让与你有着良好关系的前员工进入其它公司也有好处：如果这种良好关系能够持续，它就会反过来给你提供情报。
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，职业道路是一种产品的组合，而不是一系列的头衔。拥有后一种思维模式的人将职业发展看成头衔的阶梯。这个阶梯的意义现在已经大大降低了——真正有意义的是一系列的项目。《同盟》这本书给出了一种新方法，让你能够以系列项目的形式管理团队和人员，并因此获得巨大成功。而作为一名管理者，你能为员工做到什么呢？你无法给他们终身雇佣的保证，但可以帮助他们发展终身就业的技能。做到这一点才是真正对员工好。
