Who Is Bob Miles?
By: Michael Kanazawa
Bob is co-author of BIG Ideas to BIG Results. Early in his career he taught at Harvard Business School, the Yale School of Management and the Stanford Executive Institute, was Dean of Faculty at the Emory School of Business, has written several books on corporate transformation, and is the father of the management area called macro-organizational behavior. For me, he has been a consultant, advisor, mentor and now a business partner and collaborator. But, some people don’t know Bob, at least as well as I do. But don’t go out and Google him. Let me tell you about Bob, who now serves as Chairman of Dissero Partners.
By the way, if you do Google Bob Miles, the first three hits are for a marine plumber, a musician and a realtor. Robert H. Miles will get you a lot of professional information about him, but let me tell you about the real Bob here instead - you won’t find this on the Internet.
There are many people who know Bob as Dr. Robert H. Miles, the professor and the business advisor. That’s how I met him. About 15 years ago, I was leading a corporate strategy team at a Fortune 500 company and was asked to be the internal lead on the strategy portion of his work as corporate transformation architect. On a first meeting, you get what you might expect based on his credentials. He is smart, challenging, thoughtful and buttoned down. I immediately built a respect for his business experiences, knowledge and wisdom. That’s the professor and process architect in Bob.
After about three months of working together through some tough challenges there, I felt that Bob was building respect in my work as well. We were having deeper dialogues about strategy, leadership and even a bit about life. I mentioned that our conversations were quite valuable and meaningful to me and seemed very different from when we met. And I was even beginning to think maybe I should shift my career over to his side of the fence.
I remember him explaining one of the secrets to effective teaching early in his career. Bob said, “When you go to your first class with new students, you need to understand as much about each student as possible. You have to appreciate the enormous talent that has been placed in your hands. At Harvard, I used to spend two days before the opening class studying and committing to memory all my new students’ experiences and talents. That way I could get the best from every student in the classroom as we tackled different issues in different industries. And I’ve tried to carry this on to engage the executive leaders and their teams with whom I have spent most of the last two decades. However, you can’t get too familiar too soon and need to establish respect early in the semester and then can loosen up at the end.”
As you peel into the BIG Ideas to BIG Results book you’ll see how Bob translated his experiences into the fundamentals of a business advisory practice in support of executive leaders of over 25 successful corporate transformations. We now call that accumulated experience Accelerated Corporate Transformation, or ACT, which we continue to refine and streamline as we work together on a variety of breakthrough performance challenges.
Over the years I’ve come to understand that with Bob’s experiences and backgrounds in both academia and the corporate arena that there is no reason he shouldn’t be as well known as Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, and Warren Bennis. He holds the same respect in the circle of people who have come to know him through his teaching and consulting, but for all of his 25+ years of experience, I feel many in the world of business only know the “first semester” Bob at best.
One of my missions in life has been to change that.
For years we’ve talked about writing a book together and finally we’ve done it with BIG Ideas to BIG Results. Bob’s prior books were written in academic and professional styles that were initially targeted for MBA students and later for only very senior executives. This new book, we wrote to be broadly accessible from the start to managers anywhere facing almost any major performance challenge. And in the Afterword - Why We Wrote This Book, you’ll find some very open moments about the people and events that have shaped the real Bob Miles.
To help you get to know Bob as I do, I’ll offer you a few more insights that aren’t in the book. These mirror the “Six Things You Don’t Know About Mike,” which appeared earlier in this blog site.
Six Things You Don’t Know About Robert H. (Bob) Miles:
1) If you visit Cape Cod in the summer and see a 1975 (but well kept) blue and white Ford Bronco driving around, wave - it is probably Bob.
2) If you offer to buy Bob a drink, don’t go for one of those fancy new kinds. He’s an original martini drinker from before it was “popular,” and he’ll also go for a vintage Jordan cab, which he talks about discovering during his first corporate transformation project in Silicon Valley.
3) After an overnight stay at his home to begin planning the new book, we walked out to his classic 911 Carrera and put down the top for the ride to the airport. But just before we left he said he had an idea about what we could do with the extra hour or so before the flight. He ran back into the garage and came back with two shotguns, threw them in the back seat and we sped off to a skeet shooting range.
4) Bob is a poet at heart. My wife and I were fortunate to attend his daughter’s wedding in Chatham. They had summered there for years and it was a special moment. During the toast, Bob painted the picture for all of us guests of what it had been like and pointed outside to explain that the sliver of a moon that night seemed like the Cheshire cat smiling down upon the whole affair. You can ask him yourself how we almost literally burned down the classic inn later that night.
5) Bob is a self made man in the business sense, but has had the fantastic support of a wonderfully warm family that he loves to be with. His son, Alex, is Managing Partner of WealthTrust in Charlotte and his daughter, Holen Lewis, is a Vice President at Christie’s in Manhattan. Both spend long stretches with their families at the Cape and in Charlottesville with Bob and wife, Jane, whenever they can.
6) Bob is a pretty good dancer, but you may not get to see that until you’ve become a business partner or a close friend. But who knows, maybe he will let us post up a video on our blog? Probably not, but then again, you likely wouldn’t want to see Tom Peters or Warren Bennis dancing either.
These six things are a glimpse into the real Bob Miles. There is so much the world can learn from his wisdom and experiences and I hope that through our book, blog, speeches and work you’ll come to know him as I have. This is my introduction to get you beyond the professional facade. Let’s welcome him to the blog as a new way to share those deeper office hour conversations with the world.
