COMMUNICATION

About the Book

"This splendid little “pocket” book will tell all of you leaders (“oracle”-style) what you need to know about communication to enhance your everyday performance and thus enable your success. In 53 succinct chapters, this pocket oracle sets forth the basic issues you absolutely need to understand from a highly pragmatic point of view. It is not derived from theories but from the author’s 45+ years as a CEO coach and consultant. What the author shares with you is what he has learned over all of those years, thousands of presentations, and being “in the trenches” with his client CEOs to partner with them in making thoroughly competent or high performance organizations. He worked with them through the implementation, where 95% of success comes from. You will want to keep this oracle handy, and refer to it often. Some of the distilled wisdom contained here is counter-intuitive. That’s because it is based on the realities and not on platitudes about communication. The key is how you talk to yourself. It is also about how you need to interpret the world in terms of your cause and your organization’s mission. On a day-to-day basis, this book is about how to succeed personally if you are the leader. There is nothing more basic and more crucial for your success than the communication that occurs daily in your office, in the hallways, in your head, or in front of customers. It will become your daily guidebook for understanding this most problematic of every leader’s life. It may take you where you have never gone before. But where you need to go in your thinking and doing."

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.