Jeff Miller, PhD

I am a farm boy from central Ohio who is now living in the Indianapolis area. Between those places I've lived: in north Georgia, New Zealand, central Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois, western Indiana, and North Dakota. Some would say I can't keep a job.... I'll leave that judgment to you. My degrees are from Ohio State and Penn State and for close to 20 years I worked in various levels of the Cooperative Extension service in several states and nationally.... mostly in support of the 4-H Youth Development program. The final 10 years were at an organization/capacity-building level nationally and in Illinois and North Dakota. In one of my more humble moments, I tell people that I had the "illusion" of being in charge of the 4-H program in the state of North Dakota. In practice that meant it was my job title... and in reality, it meant I learned a lot of lessons about organizations, change, leadership, humility, and perspectives.

For those of you who might be curious (or have insomnia), my vitae can be found at this link. And a more"unorthodox" version of my resume can be seen here

Those experiences have very much shaped my perspectives on organizational leadership.... along with having the privilege to share and teach about servant leadership in a variety of settings in the last 20+ years.

I currently teach in the Doctoral Program in Interdisciplinary Leadership at Creighton University. I have served as faculty for the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership Academy. I've also taught for Indiana University Kelley School of Business @ IUPUI; University of Indianapolis; and Fort Hays State University in Leadership Studies. I also try to squeeze in a bit of my own consulting work. around collaboration, systems thinking/org learning, and of course servant leadership.

My current learning is taking me down two paths that at some point I think will converge. 1) There's a lot of "hurt" out there because organizations continue to dehumanize how people are treated. I'm becoming more convinced that it's a leadership imperative to support healing from those "daily paper cuts" of organizational life. 2) I'm also devoting considerable bandwidth to thinking how we can move the major metaphor of how we think of organizations from machines/silos/etc to something more organic in nature... and how can we learn from nature in how we structure organizations and their processes. The glib way of putting it.... is moving organizations from ego-systems to eco-systems.