When I began teaching in the English Department at Iowa State University in the mid-1980s, Carol David, a senior colleague, told me to join the Association for Business Communication (ABC), present at its conferences, and serve as chair for a regional conference. Although Carol David has a quiet personality, she can also be quietly implacable. I complied. Consequently, I have been a member of the ABC for 20 years now. The ABC-its journals, its conferences, and its members-is unquestionably the forum that has done the most to foster my own research.Research is inevitably a collaborative effort. As Charie Thralls (1992) concluded, "all writing, whether authored by individuals or groups, is collaborative" (p. 79; see also Rogers, 1993). Research is developed from reading the works of others. It is shaped by conversations with and suggestions from others. The entire peer-review system of our refereed journals is built on the notion that the ideas of others should shape an author's text. Although the support of family and coworkers has been vital to the development of my career, today I would like to reflect on what the ABC as a professional forum has offered me-and continues to offer to others.Despite multidisciplinary tensions, to which I will allude later, the ABC represents the idea (e.g., Toulmin, 1972) that research is not a disembodied endeavor but a practice embedded in the values of people who come together in sites or forums. To describe how this concept of forum works, I propose to identify a series of lessons I have learned from the people in the ABC. The specific purposes of this somewhat meandering lesson-learned approach is not so much to discuss my own research as it is to (a) demonstrate how one person's research is influenced by the research of others, (b) describe the breadth of research the ABC has fostered, and (c) pinpoint key issues in conducting business communication research.