Biography

For the past thirty-five years Lawrence M. Miller has worked to improve the performance of organizations and the skills of their leaders. His expertise is derived from hands on experience creating change in the culture of hundreds of organizations.

He began his work in youth prisons after recognizing that the learning system in the organization had exactly the opposite of its intended effect – increasing, rather than decreasing, dysfunctional behavior. For four years he worked to redesign the prison system by establishing the first free-economy behind prison walls, where each inmate had to pay rent, maintain a checking account, and pay for everything he desired. This was one of the first applications of behavior analysis in the correctional setting.

He has been consulting, writing and speaking about business organization and culture since 1973. After ten years with another consulting firm, he formed his own firm, the Miller Howard Consulting Group in 1983. In 1998 he sold his firm to Towers Perrin, an international human resource consulting firm and became a Principal of that firm. In 1999 he left that firm to focus on his interest in serving non-profit organizations and solo consulting projects.

He and his firm were one of the early proponents of team-based management and worked with many clients to implement Team Management from the senior executive team to include every level and every employee in the organization. The Team Management process created a company of business managers, with every employee focused on continuous improvement of business performance. In addition to directing the overall change process, Mr. Miller personally coached the senior management team of many of his clients.

The implementation of Team Management led to the realization that the whole system of the organization needed to be redesigned to create alignment so all systems, structure, skills, style and symbols support the same goals and culture. From this realization he developed the process of Whole System Architecture that is a high involvement method of rethinking all of the systems, structures and culture of the organization. Among his consulting clients have been 3M, Corning, Shell Oil Company, Amoco and Texaco, Shell Chemicals, Air Canada and Varig Airlines, Eastman Chemicals, Xerox, Harris Corporation, McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A, Merck and Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, United Technologies, Metropolitan Life and Landmark Communications.

Mr. Miller has authored nine books, among them American Spirit: Visions of A New Corporate Culture, which was the text for Honda of America’s course on their values and culture; and Barbarians to Bureaucrats: Corporate Life Cycle Strategies, which draws on the history of the rise and fall of civilizations to illustrate the patterns of leadership and evolution in corporate cultures. Most recently he authored Lean Culture – The Leader’s Guide that provides a road-map to implementing lean management and culture. He has also authored Lean Team Management, a workbook for team leaders and members, the core human process of lean organizations. He has appeared on the Today Show, CNN, made numerous appearances on CNBC, has written for The New York Times and been the subject of a feature story in Industry Week magazine.

Positions Held

• Counselor, North Carolina Department of Corrections
• Founder and President, Behavior Management Systems Associates
• Executive Vice President, Behavioral Systems, Inc.
• President, Tarkenton & Company
• Founder and President, Miller Howard Consulting Group
• Principal, Towers Perrin, Inc.
• Current Consulting Practice, L. M. Miller @ Associates

Academic Positions and Lectures

Visiting Lecturer at the following University Schools of Business

• Emory University: Goizueta Business School
• University of Georgia Business School (Executive MBA)
• George Washington University School of Business
• Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania
• Landegg International University in Switzerland, Faculty of International Management, lecturer in Organization Development, Change Management and Team Leadership
• Courses Presented at the University Level:
  • Team Leadership and Decision Making
  • Leadership and Organization Development
  • Organization Culture and Leading Change

Speaking Engagements:

Mr. Miller has been keynote speaker at more than five hundred association and corporate meetings. His speaking clients have included American Association for Training and Development, American Society for Quality, American Productivity & Quality Center, dozens of other associations and hundreds of corporations.

Publications:

• Founding Executive Editor and current member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management.
• Author of Op-Ed article for the New York Times.
• Subject of a Feature story in Industry Week Magazine.
• Five articles in Executive Excellence Magazine.

Books:

• Behavior Management: The New Science of Managing People at Work, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Inter-Science Series, 1978. (Out of date, don’t recommend it.)
• American Spirit: Visions of a New Corporate Culture; William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1984. (Still good stuff, but now incorporated into more recent work.)
• Barbarians to Bureaucrats: Corporate Life Cycle Strategies; Clarkson Potter (Crown Books), 1989. (Still worth reading IMHO!)
• From Management to Leadership; Productivity Press, 1995. (OK, but better to read Lean Culture at this point.)
• Team Management: Creating Systems and Skills for a Team Based Organization; Miller Howard Consulting Group, (with Jennifer Howard), 1994. (Now out of date and superseded by Lean Team Management.)
• Change Management: Creating the Dynamic Organization through Whole System Architecture, Miller Howard Consulting Group, (with Helene Uhlfelder), 1997. (This is a good workbook on socio-tech design.)
• Spiritual Enterprise: Building Your Business in the Spirit of Service; George Ronald Publishers, 2007. (For those interested in my more religious side/roots.)
• Lean Team Management; L. M. Miller Consulting, 2009. (This is my current training manual.)
• Lean Culture – The Leader’s Guide, L.M. Miller Publishing, 2011. (This is a short version of the above, plus additional material focused on the role of leaders in a lean organization.)
• Sustainable Wealth; an unpublished manuscript that I REALLY need to get working on!