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 relationships with the news we attend to, the gossip we consume, and the places we are familiar with. We have relationships with our clothes, our lotions and potions, our grooming equipment, our computers and our snow shovels. Taken together, all of the relationships we have had, have today, and will have in the future attach us to our worlds in an admixture of pushes and pulls on our attention and our behavior. Metaphorically, it might visually look much like an intricate circular spider web, with us individually stuck at the core. We use the singular “relationship” here because we want to explore what it is that all relationships have in common: relationship.

Relationships are sticky. They are far easier to fall into than to escape from. They are often demanding, requiring our attention when we wanted to devote our attention elsewhere. The drama of misplaced keys or a balky computer can take over our lives. We have hopes for certain relationships. We can be disappointed in how they turn out. But most of the myriad relationships that affect our lives just sort of happen. If they don’t serve our purposes as we think we deserve, we drop them. A piece of clothing that just doesn’t look right in the light can be dropped. That’s something you can’t do with your own baby. You have a relationship with your body. If you’re rich, you can get a remodeling job. If you’re not, you may be stuck with the body you’ve got.

Some relationships bring us down. Other relationships lift us up. In this book, you will learn how to create the kinds of relationships you need to get to where you want to go. The relationship you have with yourself is key.

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 adventure—this seeing why you are the way you are and your world is the way it is. Most people don’t 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.

Travel where you will in today’s America, and you’re likely to be drawn into a conversation about mistreatment by one or more of today’s organizations. Someone ordered something. But when the order came it wasn’t what they ordered. That was two years ago and still ongoing. Or “Your call is very important to us. That’s why you’re 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 organization? It may depend upon whom in the organization’s you’re talking to. An organization’s marketing is not an organization’s performance. It’s just talk. Organizations live and die by their deeds. This book tells you how.

Malfunctions in organizations are ubiquitous. They occur in every kind of organization of every size. Why is that? How do you avoid falling victim to the conventional, to mediocrity? This book can be your guide.

Add to that the fact that highly paid CEOs are often frustrated by the performance of their own organizations. That’s one reason for their ever-shortening tenure in that role. They are often disgruntled by the performance of their own executives and managers. And those employees are often openly dissatisfied with the organizations where they work. Even after thousands of books and many thousands of conferences since the 1970s, our organizations don’t seem to be doing much better. Here is that rare book that tells you how to perform in the real world.

This book addresses those problems head-on. It addresses the sources (not the symptoms) of organizational dysfunctions. Regardless of title, you won’t find elsewhere a better guide to making competent organizations, which is where the problems lie. This book is about how you, the CEO or CEO aspirant, need to think about what needs thinking about, for how you think about what needs thinking about will determine who you are. And who you are determines what you can and cannot do about making yours a fully functioning, competent organization. Just reading about it is not of much help. Aristotle said many years ago, “What you must learn, you must learn by doing.”

This book is unique; it tells you how to do just that.

“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.

There have been many thousands of books and seminars on the subject of leaders and leadership over the past few decades. Most make no effort to explain that leadership is amoral. It is a power over others that can be used for good or for ill. People are subjected to all kinds of abuse by their leaders organizationally or politically, and as children, they are being poorly led by their parents and teachers.

The original concept of leadership was that it would be used for good purposes—that those who purported to be “leaders” would have virtues that would necessarily be good for the people, for their communities, and for the larger culture. This is obviously no longer the case. There has been plenty of talk about successful leaders, but successful leaders are not necessarily good leaders. Merely making the numbers or being successful in some quantitative way does not imply good leadership.

This book, which has already attracted wide attention because it is so outspoken, unpacks the concept of leadership. Once one knows how to do this, identifying the good from the bad becomes much easier. The benefits to all of us as individuals and to the world we all share can be remarkable. It is time to stop idolizing our leaders. It is time to call them to task. It is time to help them become what they should be. The Good Leader can do this for them and for you.

Everyone would like to have a more competent organization. There is a lot of fairy dust out there about how to accomplish that the easy way. But there is no easy way . . . that works. To customers and other stakeholders, it is the performance of the organization that matters. They could not care less about promises that are only sometimes kept. They expect performance.

This book not only tells you how you have to think in order to make this happen but it offers many of the basic tools and techniques for doing so. Making a fully competent organization is a tough go, but it is doable. This book tells you how. It is based upon many years of successful, hands-on experience in creating fully competent—even great—organizations of all sorts and sizes. With this book as your guide, you, too, could have that competent organization you dare to dream of.

For the past forty-five years or so, I have been traveling the world doing hundreds of seminars for chief executives. My main contribution, however, has been working “in the trenches” with a few of them to help them make competent or even great organizations. Each is a complex endeavor that has to be customized to the particular organization and its particular executives. I’ve talked about this. And I’ve answered many questions about it. The time finally came to set forth how to think about doing this, as well as how to get started in actually implementing some of the basics.

This book summarizes my unique approach to making high-performance organizations and the leadership required to do so. It is dedicated to those courageous and committed chief executives who volunteered to undergo the stresses and anguish of making great things happen. It is likely that I have learned as much from them as they have learned from me. We have been passionate partners in making great things happen.

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 care either. They’ve convinced us only that we can get there faster if we adapt to them.

It’s a strange trade-off. We give them our money to take us wherever they’re going—whether they are our financial advisers or our current diet pundits or the celebrities we “love.” They make our pop culture, and then, our pop culture makes us.

If it is your intention to read one good book this season, this is it. Not only will you learn how you got to where you are, but what your indifference to your own intentions had to do with it.