Leadership Virtuosity

About the Book

“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 world’s leading consultants, brings you the building blocks for becoming a virtuoso leader: 1. The “lucky” leader 2. The “good” leader 3. The real-world leader 4. The imaginative leader 5. The trustworthy leader 6. The triangulating leader 7. The articulate leader 8. The responsible leader 9. The defining leader 10. The caring leader 11. The accomplishment-minded leader 12. The learning leader 13. The seductive leader 14. The intolerant leader 15. The potent leader 16. The omnipresent leader 17. The frugal leader 18. The strategic leader 19. The passionate leader 20. The performing leader You will return again and again to the wisdom you can partake here. You may be challenged but rewarded all at the same time. As one reviewer puts it, “The son of a gun made me think.” That’s what Dr. Thayer aims to do in this book. Becoming a virtuoso requires mastery of the basics. Beyond that, it requires a new and different way of thinking about the role of a leader. This book provides that in a provocative but practical way—as only the virtuoso executive coach and consultant Lee Thayer could do it.

About the Author

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Life’s Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.