Real Teams Win

Praise for Real Teams Win: What Smart Leaders Need to Know Now About Achieving Peak Performance by Tom Steding

“Our world is filled with sage advice, prescriptions and checklists about teams, all sure to improve performance. Remarkably, something remains missing; you’ll find it in this book. Dr. Tom Steding lays out his breakthrough, experience-built process sluicing through team performance barriers. Heed his advice to create teams that will make a difference in this upside-down world.  In the world of strategic positioning, Tom’s Point That Matters is “start with empathy, Achieve Team Unachievable.” Enjoy every page.” —Nick Copping, founder & CEO of Zoom Marketing        

“Real Teams Win delves into the dynamics of leadership and teamwork. And as Tom demonstrates with his Blueprint in Action, true leadership may not be what you think it is.” — Mike Nelson, former Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs of Google

“Real Teams Win is truly a winner. Tom Steding has done this for more than a dozen teams. Study this and do it for your team.” — Dan Lynch, internet pioneer and founder of Interop

“Tom Steding has lasered in on the issues, mostly ‘soft’, of how to get to teams that actually work well together and can use this to Disrupt and Lead. A ‘must read’ for an entrepreneur that wants to create something sustainable.” — John Porter, Chairman of AML Analytics, cofounder and former Chairman of VeriFone

“Real Teams Win offer useful tools and perspectives to create better, more effective and collaborative organizations.” — George Sollman, former Chairman of American Electronics Association

“Real Teams Win is a masterpiece. It is required reading for leaders looking to master the emotional currents that liberate their company’s full potential at all levels and more. Read this book, you have found the right book at the right time.” — Stephen Aizenstat PhD, founder and Chancellor of Pacifica Graduate Institute, founder of Academy of Imaginal Arts and Sciences

“Through a practical framework, Real Teams Win helps leaders redefine the art of leadership with a depth of knowledge intersecting personal experience, science, and mythology to create more authentic, result-driven organizations.” — Blaise Bertrand, former executive at Facebook, Google, IDEO

“Dr. Tom Steding has proven repeatedly in his work as a CEO that he knows exactly what needs to be done to build and lead a real team. If you follow his process, you’ll be able to create a team that will accomplish more, faster than ever before.” — Dr. Dan Thomas PhD, CEO of Focus, Inc. and author of Business Sense: Exercising Management’s Five Freedoms

“Tom’s work underscores the richness and power of creativity over a task-oriented approach. His book Real Teams Win, his guidance and his consulting skills are invaluable for all CEO’s across industries. Now more than ever, Tom’s wisdom will make transformational change possible.” — Michela Abrams, founder of MOCA+, former CEO of Dwell Media

“The myth of the omnipotent CEO makes great press but damages its leaders and employees. Real Teams Win describes a better way to build high performance organizations through creative collaboration, creating a blueprint of Enterprise, Culture, Mindset and the practices and principles necessary to implement a new culture –one that where both the people and company thrive and excel.” — Steve Blank, Defense Business Board at US Department of Defense, Adjunct Professor and Lecturer at Stanford, Columbia and author of The Startup Owner’s Manual

“Tom Steding begins his book, Real Teams Win, by asserting that to understand how an organization really works, it is much more useful to look at its internal networks that show how information and influence really flow than to rely on a traditional org chart that indicate only formal relationships. He also argues that building strong teams is more critical to the success of a business than finding an heroic leader. Steding uses these insights as jumping-off points to describe in detail the principles and practices that organizations need to adopt in order to create a healthy culture and sustain productive teams. Steding’s book is an artful blend of theory drawn from a variety of disciples including mythology and psychology, and practical advice that is firmly grounded in his extensive experience working with a wide range of companies.” — Richard Adler, Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future

“In this timely, remarkable, emotionally intelligent presentation of a truly 21^st century vision of leadership, Dr. Steding offer an engaging, deceptively “easy” read of how his deep understanding of complexity can be transformatively applied to teams in organizations. Having put his principles into practice, I can attest to their efficacy. In a nutshell, creative collaboration engenders group wisdom which, when applied to the business sector, achieves far more than any individual, no matter the genius. Real Teams Win yields magic results.” — Joseph Cambray PhD, President and CEO of Pacifica Graduate Institute

“Since the start of the Industrial Age, businesses have been built on a mechanical model that in no way, shape or form maps to the most effective ways for humans to work together. Tom Steding has made the compelling case that collaborative teams built on the uniquely powerful human capacity for empathy are the ones that produce the most astounding results. But way beyond making the case for this, Tom has created the effective, practical, Blueprint for our time in his great book, Real Teams Win. I am thrilled that now business leaders at all levels will get to benefit from the Blueprint through this book.” — Betsy Burroughs, President of Focus Catalyst, innovation consultant at Consultants Collective, Biznology.com columnist and author of Focus: The Catalyst for Innovation

“Tom Steding has been leading teams in Silicon Valley for 40 years, including more than a dozen start-ups. He has seen it all. His perspective on authentic, effective leadership is valuable to seasoned executives, aspiring leaders and first-time managers.” — David Spreng, founder, CEO and CIO of Runway Growth Capital

“Building and growing a business is hard. Especially so since most entrepreneurs and managers start with a faulty view of leadership. Tom Steding’s book, Real Teams Win, brings over 40 years of management experience to provide a practical Blueprint for building the high-performance teams needed for a successful business today. Steding’s insight goes beyond acknowledging the importance of corporate culture. He provides the framework and steps to establish the mindset needed to create highly effective teams.” — Reid Rutherford, Managing Partner at 1Flourish Capital

“As a CEO seeking best leadership practice while running multiple companies, both public and private, Real Teams Win arrives as a breakthrough treatment of the topic. Tom Steding has reinforced what I always thought was an important part of my approach and takes it even further. I heartily recommend this for CEO reading, but also for anyone in the organization looking for a more meaningful and effective approach to their respective roles.” — Doug Cole, CEO of American Battery Technology Company

“Unlike most business books that try to turn a simple idea in to 250 pages, Tom Steding lifts the veil on the next generation of leadership philosophy that evolved in Silicon Valley over the past decade. Building upon psychology breakthroughs pioneered by Dr. Howard Teich, I saw Tom embody the true essence of leading with empathy. However, the insights go much deeper and create the foundation for an entirely new way to achieve high performance in organizations.” — B. Ray Conley, CEO of Benetic, former CEO of CreekStone Capital Management, LLC and Managing Partner at Golden Oak Ventures.

“In a world awash in chaos, Real Teams Win provides a beacon of clarity to guide leaders across all sectors of organizational form to transcend the din of disorienting events that exist today where networks trump hierarchies and people compete to cooperate.  Steding has produced an indispensable guide to anyone tasked with transforming their organization for the next generation of human challenges.” — William Steding PhD, author of Saving America in the Age of Deceit

“Distilling hard-earned learnings from leading over a dozen tech start-ups, Tom Steding offers an elegantly simple but difficult-to-master framework for fostering the true teamwork absolutely essential to a high-performing organization. Eminently practical yet enjoyable to read, Tom draws upon the lessons taught by mythology over the centuries to illustrate how each of us can leverage our unique attributes to be more effective in working within environments characterized better by amorphous networks than by defined organizational charts.” — Richard Stuebi, founder and President of Future Energy Advisors, Senior Fellow at Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy, former consultant at McKinsey & Co.

“I have known and worked with Tom Steding in senior management roles for over 20 years, and I have had the good fortune to observe firsthand his Blueprint in action.  Tom has not only written Real Teams Win, he has lived it.  His ability to bring together disparate groups of people to create highly effect teams who “get things done” is unmatched.  Everyone, from team members to CEOs, needs to read this book.” — Linda Hayes, CEO of Linda Hayes Consulting, former CEO of Andale, Inc.

“Dr. Tom Steding and I have been colleagues for well over 10 years, and I had the profound experience of helping to implement his Blueprint in a startup we ran together.  The results were nothing short of cathartic for an organization that was mired in "toxic water cooler" culture. Once trust and empathy were established, the company's ability to propel forward became unstoppable. Real Teams Win is not yet another academic trope in leadership; this work is based on a Silicon Valley Hall of Famer's real-world examples of developing highly effective teams. I highly recommend this book for any leader looking for a breakthrough in style, substance, and real results.” — Kip Quackenbush, President and COO of Nex Cubed, LLC