Some of this book’s readers will (astutely) see some parallels between this book and Thayer’s How Executives Fail. They both identify the kinds of weaknesses in an organization or its managers that will inevitably lead to its demise (or its mediocrity, which amounts to the same thing). That is inevitable. In his pioneering work of helping CEOs to transform their organizations for high-performance, Dr. Thayer has been developing a successful conceptual framework for understanding organizati...

This book is about how the world we live in is more often made by others’ intentions than our own. That is because we fail to act upon our own good or better intentions. Our modern predators (like commercial marketing) make the world we live in according to their own interests. We apparently don’t care where we’re headed as a civilization. Our predators do. So we passively adapt to the destiny they are making for us. Our technologies don’t care where we end up, and apparently, we don’t car...

This is a book about how and why people do life as they do. It is as well a bookabout how people could or should think about doing life for the benefit of their ownwell-being and that of the people they associate with.It is a book about how our feelings and our thinking interfere with how we could bedoing the life we dream of. It is a book about the mistakes we make in doing life, andhow we could avoid those mistakes.It is a book about what causes ...

Thayer always serves up a seven-course meal, and Leadership Virtuosity is a great banquet! (Chris Comeaux, president/CEO, Four Seasons). What you have in your hands is the most unique and potent book on leadership you could lay your hands on. It introduces the concept of virtuosity as the crowning achievement in all leadership. In these twenty lessons, Lee Thayer, one of the worlds leading consultants, brings you the building blocks for becoming a virtuoso leader: 1. The lucky leader 2. Th...

"This is a book about how we invent ourselves and our cultures by how we explain things. We invent our explanations, and then they invent us. It is a book about how we create our virtual worlds – the habitat of our minds – by how we explain things. It is a book about how our explanations get embedded in the stories we tell and ingest – from gossip to advertising to the pernicious “social media.” It is a book about how everything we say or do or have is an explanation. Whatever we say or do...

If the greatest gains in human health and longevity came not from medical science but from sanitation and hygiene, why might this not also not be the case with our waning mental health and longevity? That is the question this notable scholar of the human condition takes on and then answers in this provocative book. In the last years of the nineteenth century, when human life was in constant jeopardy from pestilence and desperate living conditions in crowded cities, it was changes in human ...

How leaders think determines what leaders do and how they do it. This book explores in depth how the best leaders think. The more you can think like the best leaders think, the more you can perform like the best leaders perform. The twelve chapters in this intriguing yet practical book range from Being Up to Something to Knowing What you Need to Knowto Imagination & Ingenuityto Performing Leadershipand People-Making. Throughout, these are rich and rare perspectives. You will go back again ...

This book is about how the chief executivealong with everyone else directly involvedneeds to think about transforming an okay organization into a fully competent one. Everyone would like to have a more competent organization. There is a lot of fairy dust out there about how to accomplish that the easy way. But there is no easy way . . . that works. To customers and other stakeholders, it is the performance of the organization that matters. They could not care less about promises that are o...

This book is about all of the kinds of relationships people can have. It is a very insightful book about how relationships emerge. But it is also about how indispensable they are to our ongoing sense of being who we are in the worlds we inhabit. We have relationships with various people. But we also have relationships with our possessions, with our pets, and with our pens and car keys. We have relationships with the foods we eat, the places we go, and the diversions we take. We have relati...

There have been many thousands of books and seminars on the subject of leaders and leadership over the past few decades. Most make no effort to explain that leadership is amoral. It is a power over others that can be used for good or for ill. People are subjected to all kinds of abuse by their leaders organizationally or politically, and as children, they are being poorly led by their parents and teachers. The original concept of leadership was that it would be used for good purposesthat t...

In the West, and in America particularly, we have deep-seated beliefs in 1. Evolution the idea that all things are constantly evolving in the right direction; 2. Progress the idea that whatever is newer is better, whether it is a theory or a technological tool; and 3. Consensus the idea that the more people who adopt a new idea or a new fashion in clothes or cars, the greater the likelihood that they are right. So we go from a new fashion to the next new fashion. We believe that change is ...

"People create and sustain myths to explain what they cannot or do not comprehend. They sometimes create myths to make simple what would otherwise strike them as being too complex to bear in mind. Thus we have our ancient gods and our contemporary celebrities, and the fairy tales that explain them. But there is never one cause for what happens no matter how much we might treasure our formulaic myths. Anything that happens has many seen and unseen causes. Leadership is an ideal example. We ...