Management Mistakes and Successes, Tenth Edition

Chapter 14. Herman Miller: A Role-Model in Leadership

Herman Miller, Inc., an office-furniture maker based in Zeeland, Michigan, had long been a celebrated company, extolled by numerous business texts, including Tom Peters' best seller, A Passion for Excellence, and The 100 Best Companies to Work For in America by Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz. Its furniture designs have been displayed in New York's Museum of Modern Art. It was a model of superb employee relations, and it stood in the forefront with environmentally sensitive policies. This company had been a paragon for almost seven decades.

But in the 1990s, circumstances began changing, and not for the better from Herman Miller's perspective. While sales had generally been increasing, although far from robustly, profits were seriously diminishing. Herman Miller remained the high-price, high-cost contender in an increasingly competitive market, and a market that itself was only expanding modestly. Amid these difficulties, one could wonder whether the enlightened approach to management might be turning out to be an albatross. Should it be modified or even abandoned?

BACKGROUND

D.J. DePree founded the company in 1923 in a small town in west-central Michigan. He named it Herman Miller after his father-in-law, who provided startup capital. For seven decades it was run by the DePree family, devout members of the Dutch Third Reformed Church, and they maintained a paternalistic relationship with their employees through the decades. ...