Steve Farber

Steve Farber joined the Tom Peters Company in 1994 as their first full-time staff consultant. He quickly became their most requested consultant and speaker and was given the title of "Vice President and Official Mouthpiece" (that's what it said on his business card). Tom Peters calls himself "an unabashed Farber fan," so it's no surprise that in June of 2001, Farber was the first to be honoured with the designation of Tom Peters Company Fellow. He's not exactly sure what that means, but he thinks it's a good thing.

Farber left TPC in November of 2000 and is now President and CEO of Extreme Leadership, Incorporated—an organization devoted to changing the world through the cultivation and development of Extreme Leaders in the business community. His first book, The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership, was the recipient of Fast Company magazine's Readers' Choice Award and was named one of the ten best business books of 2004 by the on-line resource, CEO Refresher. The Radical Edge, Farber's sophomore effort and follow-up to 'Leap, was hailed as "a playbook for harnessing the human spirit." He is the author of the audio series, Extreme Leadership: In Pursuit of the O.S.M. and a contributor to the anthology, Leading Authorities on Business: Winning Strategies From the Greatest Minds in Business Today. Farber's latest book, Greater Than Yourself, was a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller.

A subject-matter expert in business leadership, Farber is a senior-level coach and consultant who has conducted hundreds of client engagements with thousands of business people in a wide variety of organizations including Sun Microsystems, Wal-Mart, Federal Express, General Mills, Boeing, Discovery Networks, Intel, Kraft Foods, PHH Arval, Bridgestone-Firestone, Carson Wagonlit, YPO Detroit, Yellow Corporation, The American Medical Association, Wells Fargo, Walt Disney Imagineering, and many others. In addition to his work as a consultant, author and speaker, Farber is also the co-founding director of The Center for Social Profit Leadership, a not-for-profit organization formed to serve the leadership development needs of social entrepreneurs, and he sits on the Board of Directors of the world-renowned student leadership program, Up With People.

Coaching and inspiring Extreme Leadership at all organizational levels is Farber's passion, and he does so with a style that is part strategist, part social commentator, part comedian, and all energy.

• 4. Radical Accountability: Making the Leap from Individual Contributor to Extreme Leader

  Whatever the challenge at your company - improving customer service, coping with change, inspiring transformation, improving corporate culture, recruiting and retaining great talent, building teamwork, fostering innovation - it all comes down to this: someone has to do something significant and enlist others to help. Someone, in other words, has to take accountability. Someone has to lead. And it doesn't have to be the boss. Leadership, ultimately, has nothing to do with the title on your business card or your position on the organizational chart. It's about who you are and what you do to change things for the better regardless of your "place" in the company. In Radical Accountability, Steve will show you four personal strategies for being the architect of transformation from any position or level in the company.

• 3. The Radical Edge: The Extreme Leader's Guide to Uncommon Achievement

  In this provocative keynote, Steve Farber redefines the conventional meaning of the word, "accountability," and takes you to an audacious level of leadership, by showing how a successful business, a rewarding personal life, and a world-changing legacy are not mutually exclusive ambitions. Create remarkable legacies at work and at home by learning how to...
  
  ·Find your personal focus as a leader - that zone in which you provide total value and significance to yourself and others - regardless of what's happening in the company, the markets, or the economy ·Use the WUP technique to observe, process and interpret the world around you in order to bring new, world-changing ·Ideas to your business ·Anticipate and respond to the unspoken needs of people and markets ·Hold yourself and others to an unprecedented level of personal accountability
  

• 2. The Radical LEAP: Extreme Leadership at Work and Beyond

  In this chaotic and extreme age, business leaders must demonstrate an unprecedented level of passion, determination, foresight, dedication, and fearlessness. People won't follow empty rhetoric, but they will respond to significant, meaningful, and dramatic action. As an Extreme Leader, you need the ability to influence, the power to transform and the courage to change the world of your company, your customers, and your industry. In The Radical Leap, Steve shows you how to use the LEAP framework - Love, Energy, Audacity and Proof - to do just that - and radically improve your organization and your life.

• 1. Greater Than Yourself: 3 Steps to Attaining the New Gold Standard of Leadership

  The truly great leaders in life and work become so by causing others to be greater than themselves. After decades of time and millions of dollars spent on leadership development and mentoring programs, why is there still a crisis of leadership at many levels of the business world? By now, most business leaders have learned that their job is to expand and develop their own capacity, while simultaneously preparing the next generation of leaders to take the reins. Develop talent, they've been taught. Be a coach. A mentor. But it doesn't happen all that often. At least, not in any significant way. Maybe we've just been expecting too much. Steve Farber believes that we've actually been expecting too little. It's time, he says, to set a new gold standard for what it means to be a leader of substance and influence: The true measure of your greatness as a leader is to develop leaders who are greater than you.
  
  In this program - based on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling book, Greater Than Yourself - he shows that dedicating yourself to bringing others along so that they can achieve more than you is the ultimate way to boost talent, ramp productivity and create truly significant current and future leaders. With this powerful, three-step approach, Steve Farber reveals how your organization or team can achieve explosive results by encouraging every leader and employee to take on a Greater Than Yourself relationship for unprecedented personal growth and productivity:
  
  ·Expand Yourself - you'll discover tools to deepen and expand your personal capabilities - the raw material for true leadership. ·Give Yourself - you'll learn the art of 'philanthropizing' your leadership approach - the raw material for developing capacity in others. ·Replicate Yourself - you'll experience the power of expanding beyond your personal, one-to-one influence - the raw material for changing your organization for the better.
  As a speaker, Steve ignites audiences with the power of his ideas, and Greater Than Yourself will show you and your organization how to attain the new gold standard of leadership and re-enlist in greatness - beginning with one employee and one relationship at a time.

• Farber (Steve Farber, to you) knows his stuff! His message and delivery are Right On! (And original). And he is one helluva teacher! (You should see his evaluations. I have. Awesome)! I am an unabashed Farber fan!!
  Tom Peters
• Your message of Extreme Leadership was directly on-target and inspired the entire group. I have received a tremendous number of overwhelmingly positive responses from those that attended the meeting, and the e-mails are still coming in. Your mix of humor and emotion, together with the relevance of the topic to our situation at General Mills, kept the audience captivated. Thanks again for a great day and a compelling message. We will all remember the key message that you delivered and its importance to our everyday life - both at work and home: Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do.
  General Mills
• Working with Steve Farber helped us to conceptualize and deliver a fresh message on leadership that really energized the audience to think about everything that is familiar in a very different way. Steve worked with us in advance to understand our company's unique challenges such that he could weave them into his keynote message. The message itself was one that was simple; yet presented in a way that was engaging, and most importantly, real versus theory-oriented. Steve's message of Extreme Leadership was full of energy. His unique talent to tell compelling stories with concrete lessons and real-world application made the time particularly well spent.
  Eddie Bauer
• Your presentation helped us reinforce the need for leadership at every level of the organization and conveyed how [our] initiative can foster the type of "extreme leadership" that will help us reach new levels of success. As a result, the team left that conference energized about [our] initiative, its priorities and the role they can play as active participants in enlisting others and driving this program forward.
  Kraft Foods
• Your message to our Leadership Team in NYC...was so eloquently delivered I was left speechless. It wasn't just a speech—but rather a mantra to live and work by. It was tangible and practical and could be put to application immediately. I was thoroughly impressed in how you made the whole session so personal to Bayer Diagnostics. I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to have that experience, to watch our Leadership Team get ignited with passion, and to propel Bayer Diagnostics to GREATNESS.
  Bayer Healthcare Diagnostics Division

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  March 2009

  Greater Than Yourself

  In Greater Than Yourself, Steve Farber proves them wrong: in this powerful and inspiring story, Farber shows that the goal of a genuine leader is to help others—teammates, employees, and colleagues—become more capable, confident, and accomplished than they are themselves. Through the actions of a forward-thinking and extraordinarily successful CEO, Farber reveals the three keys to achieving this: Expand Yourself, Give Yourself, and Replicate Yourself.  Filled with actionable principles and innovative ideas, Greater Than Yourself is perhaps the most powerful message today’s business leaders can learn.

  
  
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  April 2006

  The Radical Edge: Stoke Your Business, Amp Your Life, And Change The World

  In his bestselling book The Radical Leap, Steve Farber introduced readers to Extreme Leadership, showing them how to renew their passion and excitement and become committed to changing the world for the better. Now, Farber takes readers to an even higher level of self-discovery in The Radical Edge. Farber is back, working with young Senior VP Cameron Summerfield, who has superstar sales skills but a severe and demoralizing leadership style. Along the way, both Steve and Cameron learn how taking responsibility for making the future markedly better than the present can improve the world.

  
  
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  January 2004

  The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership

  In The Radical Leap, we meet Steve, a leadership consultant who is intrigued and challenged by an enigmatic man named Edg, from whom he learns the concept of L.E.A.P. Steve is then asked to help a friend, Janice, overcome conflicts at the biotech company where she works and bring back the company''s inspiring former CEO. The company is revitalized, having undergone a radical and successful transformation.