Communication! begins with a half-dozen "Forewarnings," such as # 2:
"For the most part our ... perspectives on communication treat it as a means to more or less immediate ends. This is okay, because we can use communication in that limited way. But it trivializes our understanding of what's really at stake. ... Communication is the creator and the infrastructure of every human mind, and thus of the worlds we create ...."
The book closes, in "Performing Life," with:
"It makes a difference what you call things — and why. We humans are made of meanings. Get those right and you get the rest of it right.
"To understand at the deepest level that life is a performing art may be the best way ...."
In between, Lee Thayer's essays take us on a 20-stop tour of the world of life-making and meaning-making. His provocative ideas on "communication competencies" offer new ways to "influence people ... [and] be influenced by the world in ways presently not open to you" and, ultimately, to "a richer, more meaningful, more mindful life ...."
Visit his Leader's Journey blog.
Dr. Thayer's career as a pioneer and influential innovator in the design and development of high-performance organizations – and in the kind of leadership required of the top executive to achieve that – has spanned more than four decades. It has often been observed that he has rattled more CEOs' cages than anyone else.
Having come from a high-level executive position in industry himself, coupled with his experience as a jazz performer and arranger and his university degrees in the humanities, engineering, and psychology,
Dr. Thayer has developed a revolutionary and practical framework for understanding what it takes to lead the way to great organizations, expressively in the "how" as much as the "why". He and his CEO partners often have to invent the pushes and pulls required to achieve the kind of excellence that others can't figure out how to copy.
Early on in his career, he served as consultant to several of the Fortune 500 and other notable companies, such as IBM, AT&T, Westinghouse, Boeing, Curtiss-Wright, Pratt-Whitney, McDonnell Douglas, Phillips, Shell, General Motors, Sealtest Foods, and Hallmark. He has consulted with the U.S. Air Force, the Postal Service, numerous banks and other institutions, universities around the globe, and West Point.
He was the consultant behind the now well-known success story at Johnsonville Foods – which Tom Peters referred to as "the most remarkable example of organizational transformation" he had ever seen.
He has taken his extraordinary problem-solving skills to the Scandinavian countries (esp. Finland and Norway), to Australia, to the UK and most European countries, and to Canada, Mexico, and China. Today, he limits his work to small to medium-sized organizations where, as he says, the impact is more immediate and measurable.
His other "career," as a distinguished university professor in major universities both here and abroad (e.g., the Harvard Graduate School of Business, The University of Amsterdam, Queensland University of Technology in Australia, Universidad Complutense in Mexico, etc.) was an ongoing research project he "put up with" for thirty-five years, before "retiring" in 1991 to devote full time to his passion which, as he has described it in interviews, is
"... to help committed CEOs and other top executives transform themselves into leaders and their organizations into healthier, more vigorous, and more adaptive high-performance organizations."
Doing so, many have observed, has brought life back into those organizations, and has lifted the quality of life of its employees, both at work and at home.
