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 book takes you on an adventure, an adventure into why you are the way you are, and hence why the world you live in is the way you perceive it. It is a challenging adventurethis seeing why you are the way you are and your world is the way it is. Most people dont care, but they end up regretting not understanding this whole business of perspective in their lives gone by. You are holding in your hands the prescription for avoiding that all-too-common regret at the end of life. Herein are...

People have always tried to explain whatever they want to talk about or have to deal with in their worlds. To explain something to oneself or to others makes it comprehensible. If the explanation becomes socially tenable, it provides a person or a tribe with a perspective on their world, a way of knowing it. That perspective becomes their reality. It is a virtual reality, created by people for the use of those people. Virtual realities are products of our talk and our minds, which archive ...

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 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 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...

"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 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 ...

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...