Professor Miller’s retirement from Bucknell, in July of 2005, marked a transition from an active 38-year academic career to one of practice as a consultant, writer and community service volunteer.
He came to Bucknell in 1978 as chairman of the Management Department from Yale University, where he had served as director of admissions and student affairs for Yale’s School of Organization and Management. Prof. Miller also taught in the administrative sciences programs of Yale College and the Yale Graduate School.
He received his B.A. with Honors in Economics and International Relations from Stanford, was a graduate student of German language and literature at the University of Munich, and received his M.B.A. from INSEAD (The European Institute of Business Administration) in Fontainebleau, France. His Ph.D. in Management is from the University of Rochester. He was a faculty member in the MBA programs at both INSEAD and Rochester, prior to Yale.
Prof. Miller has served as a consultant in long-range planning, organization design, human resources, career development, and team management for a wide variety of business and service agencies, including Bell Labs, Ethiopian Airlines, the State of Connecticut, and the International Labour Office of the United Nations. His consulting activities have been devoted to organization design, team and project management development programs, especially for not-for-profit organizations. Prof. Miller’s research has resulted in publications on organizational politics, managerial career development, leadership, organization design, team management and experiential learning. He served as principal investigator on an interdisciplinary “Technologies of Management” curriculum development project funded by the General Electric Educational Foundation.
In recent years, Prof. Miller’s teaching, scholarly, and consulting interests have been focused on experiential learning methods, on the management problems of not-for-profit, social service, and educational organizations, and on the special needs of undergraduate general education students of management. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching named Prof. Miller a Fellow of the Carnegie Teaching Academy, a national society of teacher-scholars committed to inventing and sharing new models for undertaking and documenting teaching and practice as forms of scholarly work.
Prof. Miller established MGMT 101, Bucknell’s popular experiential management project course, in 1979. Publicity about that course, including articles in the Spring 1991 edition of the Journal of Management Education, in Rhythms of Academic Life (SAGE Publications, 1996) and in Business Week (Nov. 10, 1997), led to invitations to design and offer versions of it at various universities in the United States, Europe and Japan. He continues to work with colleagues and schools to develop extentions of MGMT 101, now offered in more than thirty colleges and universities around the world.
Between 1992 and 1996, Prof. Miller served as a member of the Board of Directors and as Executive Director of the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, and as director of the Teaching Society’s international conference programs in Otago/Dunedin, New Zealand (’94), Capetown, South Africa (’97) and Bocconi/Milan, Italy (’99). Throughout his career, he also served in consulting, advisory, program and manuscript review, conference and workshop organizing roles for the Academy of Management, AACSB, the Decision Sciences Institute, and other management education networks.
Prof. Miller participates actively in arts, economic development and social service communities. He was a board member and president of the Susquehanna Valley Chorale and a member of the Green Room Board of Bucknell’s Weis Center for the Performing Arts. He also served as a member of the finance committee of the Lewisburg Downtown Partnership, the Union County Community Foundation, and the Central Pennsylvania Innovation Center advisory committee. While living in Central Florida, he served as a board member of a tri-county political action organization, chairing its Education Policy Issues Caucus, EPIC. He currently serves on a strategic planning task force for his retirement community in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
Prof. Miller received Bucknell’s Class of ’56 Lectureship for excellence in teaching (1988), the Harriman Award for contributions to the community (1991), and the Forrest D. Brown Award for Community Service (2002). In January of 1997, Prof. Miller was awarded the Christian R. Lindback Chair in Management at Bucknell, and was named The Bucknellian‘s “Person of the Year” on the occasion of his retirement in 2005. In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of OBTS — The Teaching Society of Management Educators.