Lawrence M. Miller
Coach, Author and Speaker
High Performance Organization Design and Leadership
Visit Larry's blog Management Meditations and contribute to the continuous search for the keys to cultures of commitment and quality
Lawrence M. Miller's Biography
For the past thirty years Lawrence M. Miller has worked to improve the performance of organizations and the skills of their leaders. He began in our prisons. 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.
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. For five years he has been consulting on a pro-bono basis with AIESEC International, the global youth leadership organization, and serving on the boards of several other non-profit organizations.
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 recently completed Competing in the New Capitalism: How Individuals, Teams and Companies Succeed by Creating the Currency of Competition in the New Economy.
Mr. Miller previously authored six 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. He has also authored Whole System Architecture, a guidebook for redesigning organizations, and Team Management, a workbook for team leaders and members, and Change Management: A Leaders Guide to Creating the Dynamic Organization. He has appeared on the Today Show, CNN, made numerous appearances on FNN and CNBC, has written for The New York Times and been the subject of a feature story in Industry Week magazine.
Mr. Miller can be reached by email at LMMiller@lmmiller.com.