This little book is the only instruction book youll ever need about how to avoid failing by default. Youll learn how to fail on purpose, with dash and aplomb. Youll meet many familiar peoplepeople you will immediately recognizein these pages. Here and there, you might catch a glimpse of yourself.

This book is not about communication as it is generally understood, or as you may understand it. It is about how communication ought to be understood according to how it actually occurs. The popular understanding of communication is simply not consistent with the facts. If your concept of communication is faulty, you will frequently be perplexed, frustrated, and even angered. Our communication problems are not engendered by the world outside of us. They are engendered mainly because our co...

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 ...

"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...

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 ...

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 pioneering book, on the ethical and moral dimensions of communication and communication systems in the modern world, was originally published in 1974. It derived from an International Symposium on communication, consisting of world-class scholars ranging from philosophy and anthropology, to cybernetics and psychiatry, and from literary criticism to the social and behavioural sciences.The uses of communication are ubiquitous. The breadth, depth, scope and reach of every human m...

Travel where you will in todays America, and youre likely to be drawn into a conversation about mistreatment by one or more of todays organizations. Someone ordered something. But when the order came it wasnt what they ordered. That was two years ago and still ongoing. Or Your call is very important to us. Thats why youre number 19 in the queue. Doctors and hospitals make mistakes. Only a few are really fatal. But they have insurance for that. Will you get what you want from an organizatio...

This book is about the apparent incompatibility of romantic love and conventional marriage. They go together (the popular song has it) like a horse and carriage. But if the horse is ailing or otherwise not up to the task, the carriage will slowly rot away in the carriage house. It is also about the perverse fact that people bring to such relationships their expectations from the past as they remember them. Typically, they had hopes and dreams for their future together. When these are dashe...

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 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...