Bateson

Gregory Bateson has managed to get his fingers into far too many pies... His name pops up everywhere it seems, he must be the only thinker who served as an inspiration for both the freaky ultra scientific psychology of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Delueze and Guattari, who took the concept of plateaus directly from Bateson. On top of that he was a well respected anthropologist and extremely influential in the development of cybernetics.

And yeah I haven't read nearly enough of his work, just a couple anthropological essays.

[via Interconnected]