MILLER CONSULTANTS - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• President of the Danville Boyle County Chamber of Commerce

My goal is to help businesses become profitable and grow through employee engagement and credible leadership. More about Ben here. Ben Nelson provides proven organizational solutions to help leaders and organizations achieve results in strategy and performance. In his 25 years as an organizational development and human resources professional, Ben has personally instructed and coached over 2,500 individuals in 35 states in the United States and Canada. He has worked with leaders from for-profit and not-for-profit organizations within healthcare, manufacturing, education, financial services, and social services including Ephraim McDowell Health System, Farmers National Bank and its subsidiary Wealthsouth, Heart of Kentucky United Way, Community Arts Center, CASA of the Bluegrass, Centre College, and Trinity Episcopal Church. Ben is former Corporate Vice President of Organizational Development and Training for Alliance Data in Texas responsible for the organization's human capital strategy in the company's corporate strategic planning group. He led efforts that resulted in Alliance Data being recognized as a Best Place to Work across the nation. Prior to that, Ben worked for fifteen years in the aerospace and defense sector. Very active in his community, Ben has served as president of the Danville Boyle County Chamber of Commerce, chair of the board of directors of CASA at Woodlawn, Secretary/Treasurer of the Boyle County Economic Development Partnership, and board member of numerous civic organizations. He has been honored as the Chamber of Commerce's 2012 Outstanding Citizen and The Heart of Danville's 2009 Volunteer of the Year. Over the years, Ben's work has garnered national awards and recognition appearing in numerous publications and media. He is a sought-after public speaker as he shares insight into creating profitability and growth through employee engagement and credible leadership.

Job Titles:

• Consultant
• Director
• Instructor
• Member of the Board
• Board Member for the Model Forest Policy Program

Emily Talley is an instructor and consultant with twenty years of leadership experience in the Fortune 200 corporate, national nonprofit, and higher education sectors. Read more about Emily here. Emily Talley is an instructor and consultant with twenty years of leadership experience in the Fortune 200 corporate, national nonprofit, and higher education sectors. As a Senior Fellow with the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS) at Virginia Tech, Emily serves as faculty for the Master of Natural Resources and the Executive Master of Natural Resources programs. Her specialties with Virginia Tech, and as a Senior Consultant for Miller Consultants and Principal of Talley Consultancy, are communication, leadership, networking, and employee professional development. Prior to her role with CLiGS and the formation of her consultancy, Emily was the Senior Director of Community Affairs for Capital One Financial Corporation, where she connected lines of business and nonprofit partners to lead and advance financial education programs, national philanthropy, and employee engagement through volunteerism. Previously, she directed Gonzaga University's development efforts in support of Native American outreach, leadership, and community service programs, and spent five years as a writer and community development director for America's Promise - The Alliance for Youth, a national nonprofit founded by General Colin Powell, USA (Ret). Programs created and led by Emily and her teams have received recognition and awards from the Points of Light Institute, the Taproot Foundation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Board Source, Junior Achievement USA, and the Washington Business Journal. A board member for the Model Forest Policy Program, Emily also served as a founding member of the Taproot Foundation's Pro Bono Leadership Council, a board member for Alternative House, a member of the Spokane Task Force on Race Relations, and a mentor and tutor. Emily received a B.A. in English from The College of William and Mary, an M.A. in Communication and Leadership Studies from Gonzaga University, and an Executive Master of Natural Resources from Virginia Tech.

I am fascinated by the role of risk-taking in organizational and personal change, an interest that flows naturally from a life spent in the high mountains of the world. As an avid climber living in the Canadian Rockies, I have combined this passion with academic and journalistic examinations of the place of risk in our lives. More about Geoff here. Geoff Powter has 35+ years of experience as an organizational development and change consultant. Trained as a psychologist, Geoff blends his clinical experience of the processes and challenges of change with years of experience of leaders, teams and organizations. Geoff has developed a strong reputation as a provocative and supportive facilitator who is willing to dive into difficult and complicated issues in the life of a team. He has a deep passion for and curiosity about the process of change and development, as well as a capacity for engaging clients in those passions. Geoff has worked with clients across North America and internationally, in all streams of business and all sizes of enterprise, including recently Enbridge, Suncor, Essential Energy, BluEarth Renewables, TerraCon Géotechnique, Brookfield Residential, Alberta Treasury Branch, Government of Alberta, Environment Canada, Indian Affairs and Northern Development Canada, Farm Credit Canada, Pason Systems, Alberta School Employees Benefits Plan, and IATSE 891. Geoff completed post-graduate training in clinical psychology at McGill University and The University of Calgary, and began his organizational work soon after, joining the faculties of The Banff Centre and Pacific Center for Leadership in the 1980s. From an early age Geoff has had a strong interest in the outdoors and the world of adventure, and has built this interest into his life and work. He has participated in thirteen Himalayan expeditions, and has written extensively about adventure, in particular, the psychology of adventure. His book Strange and Dangerous Dreams: The Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness won the 2006 Jury Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Festival. He also authored the books We Cannot Fail: The Dark Psychology of Heroic Adventure and Inner Ranges: An Anthology of Mountain Thoughts and Mountain People.

Gresham Smith is a full-service architecture, engineering and design firm specializing in solutions for life's most essential infrastructure and institutions. They specialize in markets including Aviation, Building Engineering, Corporate + Urban Design, Healthcare, Industrial, Land Planning, Transportation Water + Environment. The Miller team works with Gresham Smith in the early stages of projects to assess the cultural needs and desires of their clients. For example, we worked with Gresham Smith to assist Lifeway Christian Resources to identify the culture that they envisioned to best support their mission as they planned for building a new corporate campus. Gresham Smith always designs with corporate culture and brand in mind.

Job Titles:

• Adjunct Professor
• Coach
• Consultant

I help people become better leaders, create more effective teams, and inspire their organizations to produce great results amidst uncertain, complex, and ambiguous conditions. I am passionate about facilitating learning to help build more resilient, diverse, respectful, responsive and inclusive teams where challenges are confidently met and people deliver for the business and for each other. More about Judy here. Judy Ellis is a consultant, coach, and facilitator with over 30 years of leadership experience in untangling complex interpersonal and organizational dynamics. Whether the need is one-on-one coaching or organizational consulting, Judy's focused, direct, and warm approach delivers practical solutions in which both leaders and their organizations discover their best results. Judy's knowledge of human and organizational dynamics has repeatedly produced strategies and aligned tactics that yield insight, guidance and direction to individuals and organizations alike. Her one-on-one coaching with leaders enables solid advances whether the need is developing stronger leadership presence, improved conflict management skills, increased cultural competence, higher emotional intelligence, more persuasive influence or communication skills within their current position or in advancing to the next level. Judy's work quickens the untangling that's necessary for progress, whether the knots are within individuals, among team members, or arise from the complexities of the organization as a whole. Her practical approach is built on a foundation of 10 years of hands-on management experience in Finance, Human Resources, and Corporate Communications at Procter & Gamble; combined with serving 20+ years as an external consultant in a variety of business sectors, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. Training and consulting engagements delivered by Judy and her teams have included organizations as diverse as Toyota Motors, Hillenbrand Corporation, the Urban League, Xavier University, the CIA, Americans for the Arts, The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the City of Cincinnati Police Department. Judy and the Diversity and Inclusion consulting company she co-founded, Integrity Development, have received recognition and awards from the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, the Ohio Minority Supplier Development Council, The Points of Light Foundation, and the YMCA of Greater Cincinnati. Judy serves as an Adjunct Professor in the University of Cincinnati's Applied Psychology Program, where she designed and teaches a Master's level course in Workforce Diversity. Judy has a B.S. in Management and Organizations from Indiana University's Kelly School of Business and a Master's Degree in Theology. She is a member of the International Association of Business Communicators and the Society of Human Resource Managers, where she has spoken on topics including Diversity & Inclusion and Culture. She is active in nonprofit leadership boards, including Make-A-Wish, Equipping Ministries International, Indiana University Alumni Association, and the Procter & Gamble Alumni Foundation.

I believe in the critical role of leaders in organizational success. My love is to help senior and middle leaders increase their impact personally and organizationally during times of change. More about Kathi here. Kathi Irvine works with senior and middle leaders to increase their impact, personally an organizationally, and support organizational change initiatives. Kathi's clients hail from a wide range of industries, including government, not-for-profit and for-profit organizations such as Lexmark International, Rogers Radio, RBC Financial Group, BC Hydro, Essential Energy Services, Suncor, Canadian Forces, Metro Vancouver, Envision […]

Job Titles:

• CEO
• Chairman of the Board

For over 30 years, Kathy Miller Perkins has helped some of the most admired and well-known organizations around the world build organizational cultures that truly support their purpose, values, and strategies. Read more about Kathy here. Kathy Miller Perkins is a psychologist and the CEO of Miller Consultants - an organization innovation company that focuses on helping companies succeed by translating purpose and vision into actions to attract talent, engage people and inspire innovation. She founded Miller Consultants to make a difference in the work lives of people through the workplaces that employ them. Over the past 30 plus years, she has had the privilege of working with the most admired and well-known companies around the world, including Toyota, Brown-Forman, Dow, and Procter and Gamble to name a few. And she has witnessed people thriving when they understand how their work contributes to their company's success and to society's well-being. Working collaboratively with national and international clients, she builds vibrant cultures to support purpose, develops transformational leaders who collaborate and innovate, and increases organizations' capacity for change. She is the author of Leadership and Purpose: How to Create a Sustainable Culture, published by Routledge Press. In addition, she has published articles in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Press, Inside Supply Management, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance and Journal of Corporate Citizenship. In 2015 she and George Serafeim of the Harvard Business School coauthored a chapter on Chief Sustainability Officers for Oxford University Press book, Sustainability, and Change.

Job Titles:

• Leader

Katrin is a thought leader in the transformative space of sustainability and responsibility. She has recently published Five Superpowers for Co-creators (www.5superpowers.org), led or contributed to the development of the www.GAPFRAME.org translating SDGs into national priorities, the SDG strategy tool SDGXCHANGE (www.SDGx.org), the Competency Assessment for Responsible Leadership (www.carl2030.org), and contributed to the 50+20 movement (www.50plus20.org). Until 2018, she helped transform the Business School Lausanne, where she acted as Dean from 2008-2015 until self-organization made such a title redundant. From 2010 onwards, she led BSL's research activities in sustainability and responsibility related transformation of business and leadership. Prior, she gained international business experience at ALCOA (United States, Russia), IAMS Europe - Procter & Gamble (the Netherlands), Schindler Lifts (Australia) and Yupango (Switzerland). She is currently a Professor of Practice in Sustainability and Leadership at the LUISS Business School in Rome Italy. In addition, she assists clients by: By coaching responsible leaders to become positive changemakers, By consulting change-ready organizations to transform around their higher purpose, and By facilitating multi-stakeholder projects around wicked societal challenges.

Leslie Hunt has over 30 years of experience in the field of employee training and development, working primarily as a senior instructional designer. Leslie's expertise lies in her ability to work alongside a client's technical subject matter experts to analyze their jobs then take the output from these interviews to create job training curricula that produce competent, confident individual contributors. She has built multiple training and development programs for manufacturing clients including (Rohm and Haas and Eastman Chemical - petrochemical); British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Saudi Aramco (refining and oil and gas production); Bristol-Myers Squibb (pharmaceuticals); and ERICO (electrical components). Leslie has a bachelor's degree in Workforce Development and a master's degree in Instructional Technology. With her MS in Instructional Technology from the University of Houston, she has worked with clients such as Metropolitan Transit Authority Bridges and Tunnels, the City of Henderson Nevada,BC Hydro, Saudi Aramco and BP where she has developed professional development roadmaps, facilitated soft skills training, developed communications strategies to support change initiatives and assisted with current culture assessments.

Job Titles:

• Organizational Consultant

Meredith Lepley is an organizational consultant specializing in assessment - particularly assessing employee engagement, culture and organizational practices and diagnosing organizational challenges. Certified in both Prosci and The Change Cycle, Meredith has special expertise in helping employees and organizations through change. She also coaches leaders at all stages to become more effective and facilitates workshops and trainings on issues such as workplace communication, employee engagement, leadership, customer service, the multigenerational workforce, and workplace design. Her clients include Toyota, the U.S. Army, the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, Logan Aluminum, LG&E and KU, Ashland, Brown-Forman, 3M, LifeWay, the YMCA, as well as several horse farms, banks, law firms and non-profits. Having a deep knowledge of organizational psychology, Meredith is on the faculty of the University of Southern California where she teaches students in the online Masters in Applied Psychology Program how to use research to solve business problems. Holding a Ph.D. in Social Ecology from the University of California, Irvine, Meredith has worked at both the University of Kentucky where she served as Director of Research and Consulting at UK's Institute for Workplace Innovation (iwin) and at Eastern Kentucky University where she was a tenured psychology professor honored with the EKU National Alumni Association Award for Teaching Excellence and the College of Arts and Sciences Research Award. Although she usually conducts applied research with client organizations to address their specific challenges, Meredith has also conducted a good deal of academic research. Her research has examined workplace issues such as flexibility, the aging workforce, workspace personalization, pets in the workplace, and worksite health promotion. Her work has been published in academic journals including The Psychologist-Manager Journal, The Journal of Environmental Psychology, and The Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. Moreover, her work has been featured in popular media outlets including The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, The Los Angeles Times, Psychology Today and National Public Radio, as well as newspapers and radio programs in the United States, England, and Canada. She has also served as the editor of the work-life column of Business Lexington.

Job Titles:

• Member of the Board
• Secretary of the Board

Stephen Perkins calling has been to help others. He was a chaplain in Kentucky's largest facility serving adolescent felony offenders; he was a Research Associate on an NIMH-funded project researching a possible treatment of schizophrenia; and he founded - and then led for 28 years - a community-based transitional residential psychosocial rehabilitation program for persons with a severe and persistent mental illness.