Featured Author

Don Wilt

Don Wilt was born into a pioneer Oregon family that settled on an island in the Willamette River. He grew up in a tiny Oregon sawmill town, newspapered his way through journalism school at the University of Oregon, then became a pioneer himself in the newly emerging field of organizational communications. He is the author of Communicating for Productivity: Methods of Using Employee Communications to Get the Best Organizational Results. Over a career of more than thirty years in the field, Wilt helped write the book on how big organizations use communications to gain a competitive advantage and make work go better for everyone. Today he resides in a Central Oregon town even smaller than the one he started out in with his wife of fifty years, the celebrated educator and artist Priscilla Beistel Wilt. They have three adult children making their marks in the skateboard industry, graphic design, and the tinkering movement, respectively.

Titles by Don Wilt

  • Working in Tall Buildings, Vol. II I Can Laugh About it Now: My Thirty Years as a “Communications Guy”

    by Don Wilt

    Vol. II— I Get Serious …About Communications
    How, after only playacting my way through college, I used a stint teaching high school journalism to launch a career in the newly emerging field of Organizational Communications was covered in Vol. 1 of this personal memoir. Now we get to the meat of the story: the bologna.
    A guy secretary? That I had not seen coming. But the job came with a vast Organizational Communications laboratory and a captive audience of 50,000 employees. I was still using what I took from the experience at the end of my career thirty years later. By then, a lot of other people were too.
    In this volume I’m carried away by corporate winds to a place I’d known earlier only as the evil empire—Southern California, recruited into an industry at the same time that industry was giving 250,000 other people there the heave-ho. Go figure? No. Go communicate.
    This is where I’d learn that work in the big organizations can get you more than moolah. And also that there are more important skills to a career in communications than writing; what running up to touch a dead horse can get a person; and where, some say, I created my own stage and then performed upon it. For moolah.
    This is where the second half of my story is going.

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  • Working in Tall Buildings, Vol. I A Wry Look Back at My Life and Career

    by Don Wilt

    This Is the Story of How I Clawed My Way to the Middle. Some would say I pulled a rabbit out of a hat, making the leap from deep in the woods of Oregon to some of the biggest companies in the world, and then into one of the best jobs there at that. But I heard someone say you can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat unless you put one in there first, so this is also the story of how my rabbit got into the hat, and what the trick was to pulling it out….But before the big leagues came the B Leagues. This is where my story begins.

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