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Leadership Is a Choice, Not a Title
Rick Miller is a successful business executive, a servant leader, a bestselling author, and an “unconventional turnaround specialist”. Turnarounds require a special kind of leadership because it deals with deep structural issues, not only in the business processes, but in human relationships as well.
Rick credited his father as the main source of his business acumen. He even declared that everything he learned from business school merely reinforced what his dad taught him.
In business school, Rick was indirectly instructed by his professor to take a job in sales. His professor said that to be a big deal in business, you need to learn about customers and competition. And that was what a sales job can help him learn.
The problem: sales is often a commission-based job, which means if he doesn’t sell, he won’t get paid. Rick was scared to death at the thought of starving because he couldn’t sell… but he took the job anyway. And it was one of his best business decisions ever.
Every one of us has a soul that is capable of leadership. – Rick Miller
Rick met Melissa (not her real name) in a rehabilitation hospital. She is a 6-year old girl with cerebral palsy. Rick noticed that whenever Melissa is in the room, the nurses and the people around her light up. Listen to this episode to hear Rick tell the story of how Melissa was a true leader who taught him about being a “chief”.
We are all at our best when we connect what we do to who we are. – Rick Miller
From Rick’s book “Be Chief”, these are the 5 choices that we all make that affect our understanding, our insight, and as a result, our energy:
- Can we be truly present?
- Can we be still?
- Can we be accepting?
- Can we be geneous?
- Can we be grateful?
We defer to successful people too much. The fact is, we are all the same. – Rick Miller
What You’ll Learn
- The lessons Rick learned from his dad, who was a human resources management genius
- Advice for young leaders in the corporate world
- Why Rick took a sales job despite being scared to death by it
- How a 6-year old girl named Melissa helped shape Rick’s leadership style
- What does it mean to be a “chief”?
- How to find inner clarity
- How is the book “Be Chief” different from all the other leadership books out there?
- Why energy is linked to self-understanding
Resources
- Being Chief website
- Be Chief: It’s a Choice, Not a Title by Rick Miller
Bio
Rick Miller is an unconventional turnaround specialist, a servant leader, and a go-to Chief. He is also an experienced and trusted confidant, an author, a sought-after speaker, and an expert at driving sustainable growth. For over 30 years, Rick served as a successful business executive in roles including President and/or CEO in a Fortune 10, a Fortune 30, a startup, and a non-profit. In each case, he was recruited from the outside to turn around poor performance in difficult times.
Rick Miller is a Chief not because of his many high-ranking titles, but because of his ability to bring out the best in others—and in himself—using the choices he developed in his Power Compass, a road-tested sustainable growth model he created over the course of his successful career, and which he shares in this book and continues to use with his clients.
Rick has been in demand for the past ten years as a confidential adviser to many of today’s most senior executives, and is extensively connected within the global business and leadership communities. Rick continues to serve senior executives by offering broad business experience in six specific areas: customers, competitors, costs, capital, communities, and culture. Rick helps senior leaders ask the right questions.
Few career business executives have proven they can deliver sustained next-level revenue and profit growth at different companies, of different sizes, in different industries, and in tough times. Fewer have a track record of growing leaders as a primary strategy. Very few are also servant leaders who have demonstrated an ability to help other senior leaders grow their businesses and experience personal growth by drawing on first-hand experience from the front lines.
Rick Miller is one of the very few.
As President and CEO of the non-profit organization The Balance & Stretch Center, he led the development of products used by other non-profits to help children with diabetes.
Since mid-2008, Rick has worked with senior leaders across many industries including hi-tech, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, automotive, media services, financial services, and in non-profit organizations. First at Choices & Success LLC and now at BEING CHIEF LLC, the result is always growth.
Rick also works with the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western University. Specifically, as a Senior Advisor to The Strategic Innovation Lab at The Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, Rick offers counsel to engage the business community in programs that lead to sustainable long-term growth.
Rick earned a bachelor’s degree from Bentley University and an MBA from Columbia. He currently lives in Morristown, NJ.
