Ben Casnocha

 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.

Based on Ben’s recent New York Times bestselling book with Reid Hoffman, founder/chairman of LinkedIn, in this keynote he explains how to recruit, manage, and retain the entrepreneurial employees your business needs to succeed in the networked age. You’ll learn:

• What all innovative companies do with their best employees.
• Why it’s possible to rebuild trust and loyalty with your employees even though you can't guarantee lifetime employment.
• How to manage employees who seek constant career growth by defining unique “tours of duty.”
• Why it pays to empower your employees to build their personal brands and expand their professional networks.
• How to develop an employee value proposition that resonates with millennials.

Through keynotes and interactive workshops, this is the management and business framework that will help your company generate Silicon Valley-style innovation, delivered by one of the field’s most engaging speakers.

The career escalator is jammed at every level. Unemployment rates are high. Creative disruption is shaking every industry. Global competition for jobs is fierce. The employer-employee pact is over and traditional job security is a thing of the past.

In a keynote based on his #1 New York Times bestselling book, Ben presents a blueprint for how to thrive in this new economic landscape. The key: learn to think and act like an entrepreneur. In other words, move up that jammed escalator by running your career like it’s a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you.You don’t need to start your own business, but you do need to adopt the mindset and learn the skill set of entrepreneurs.

Why? Start-ups - and the entrepreneurs who run them - are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead in today’s fractured world of work.

In this keynote, you will learn the Silicon Valley strategies that can jump-start you career. This is a bold presentation on thriving in a world where every professional must be the entrepreneur of his or her own life.

Today, four generations are in the same workplace at the same time. This is unprecedented. And it introduces a host of challenges and opportunities. You can’t manage millenials the way you were managed. To bring out the best of your millennial employees, and to create a corporate culture where all generations can effectively work with each other, you need to rethink every aspect of how you recruit, manage, and retain employees.

Ben’s background makes him uniquely qualified to deliver this entertaining keynote: as “one of America’s top young entrepreneurs” according to BusinessWeek he speaks credibly on his own generational dynamics while also drawing upon his leading corporate experience.

We live and work in the networked age--the social networking era is just getting started. Ben argues that “network literacy” is the new type of literacy that counts. He explains the hidden power of LinkedIn and other social media, but more importantly, provides a sophisticated perspective on how people networks shape everything we think and do—and how to leverage those networks to solve important business and career challenges.

He’s not another generic “social media guru.” Ben spent two years at LinkedIn in the Office of the Chairman and was named one of the “25 most influential people in the world of internet and politics” by PoliticsOnline.