HBR's 10 Must Reads for HR Leaders Collection (5 Books)

Tours of Duty

The New Employer-Employee Compact.

by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh

FOR MOST OF THE 20TH CENTURY, the compact between employers and employees in the developed world was all about stability. Jobs at big corporations were secure: As long as the company did OK financially and the employee did his or her job, that job wouldn’t go away. And in the white-collar world, careers progressed along an escalator of sorts, offering predictable advancement to employees who followed the rules. Corporations, for their part, enjoyed employee loyalty and low turnover.

Then came globalization and the Information Age. Stability gave way to rapid, unpredictable change. Adaptability and entrepreneurship became key to achieving and sustaining ...