There Is an I in Team  (English, Hardcover, de Rond Mark)

“De Rond looks at what top performance athletes and coaches know about high performance …to challenge common assumptions about teams.” – Irish Times

“A very well researched and stimulating book.” – HR Zone

Anyone who leads a team or is part of one understands the day-to-day challenges of managing and working with a group of individuals. How can we get the team to be more than the sum of its parts? Why isn't the team performing up to its potential? How can we get people to work together more effectively?

According to young Cambridge professor Mark de Rond, key team-management dilemmas such as these are the same in sports as in business. Though sports metaphors are used profusely in everyday business parlance (we level the playing field by sending in the heavy hitters who happily step up to the plate or take one for the team, even as the goal posts have moved), these flip phrases can disguise the serious and substantial lessons that can be learned from the world of sports and applied to business. For example, the iconic team-building phrase favored by business consultants and managers, "there is no I in team," may be lexicographically correct but as a team guiding principle it is profoundly impractical and flawed. Through numerous examples from sports, highlighted by quotes from distinguished coaches and players around the world, de Rond shows what team leaders can learn by focusing on the individuals within them.

Other topics that de Rond explores - using insights and first-hand accounts from professional sports combined with cutting-edge research in social psychology, anthropology, organizational behavior, and the economics of sports - include:

• Why the very same qualities that make team members attractive make them horrible team-mates too
• Why the best team is hardly ever comprised of the best individual performers
• Why the best teams are in constant need of repair
• Why likeability trumps competence in even the most technically sophisticated environments
• Why a focus on interpersonal harmony will destroy team performance and kill the team
• Why conflict happens even when intentions are perfectly aligned
• Why size does matter and fewer is better
• Why statistics, analytics and other "moneyball" techniques can never replace the role of intuition in predicting individual and team performance

Reviews
“The Abilene Paradox is just one of many fascinating revelations in this important book. Teams from the worlds of sports to business to nonprofits to family groups can benefit from de Rond’s revealing insights.” Financial Executive

“Intriguing new book”  Financial Times

“Successful sports coaches have always understood that a lack of conflict in teams is not always a good thing and a belief in luck can be an important power-enhancing tool. Now, argues de Rond, it is high time business managers realised the same thing.”  I: Global Intelligence for the CIO

About the Author
Mark de Rond is an associate professor of Strategy and Organization at Judge Business School, Cambridge University. His latest research includes ethnographies of teams of athletes, military surgeons, and improvisation comedians.

Mark teaches and consults with various organisations, including IBM, McKinsey, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Shell Exploration, the Department for Education and Skills, OfCom, Stephenson Harwood, Herbert Smith, Allen & Overy, Addleshaw Goddard, Lloyds-TSB, Coventry Building Society, Anglia Water Group, Diageo, Rolls Royce and BT. His research has been featured in The Economist, TIME magazine, The Financial Times, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Management Today, The Week, Der Spiegel, De Volkskrant, Het Financieel Dagblad, and on BBC Radio 4, the BBC World Service, BBC Cambridgeshire and TalkSPORT, as well as on Dutch national radio. Mark's most recent book "The Last Amateurs" was listed as one of the 12 Best Business Books of 2008 by The Financial Times, appeared on JP Morgan's 10th annual summer reading list (top 10 of 500), and included in a review of 10 of the Best Sporting Reads of 2008 by BBC Sport.