Martha Miller

Martha Miller, Ph.D., became interested in cross-cultural communication while being tossed on a blanket by Eskimos at the age of three. As part of an Air Force family, she traveled extensively and in later years incorporated the exposure to many different cultures into a unique set of skills and competencies. Miller has worked on projects focusing on high-performance work systems and managing diversity in the workplace. Her clients include General Electric, IBM, Hewlett Packard, the Royal Bank of Canada, General Motors and the U.S. Foreign Service. She was asked by NASA to advise them on cross-cultural dynamics affecting optimal crew selection for the Space Station, which will have European, Canadian and Japanese crew members in addition to U.S. astronauts.

Miller has published extensively. Her articles include "Enter the Stranger in Explaining Organization, Person Concepts: The Effect of Target Familiarity and Descriptive Purpose on the Process of Describing Others" in the Journal of Personality, and Organization Behavior in Social Psychology: SPSSI's Perspective.

Miller holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1974. She received her Ph.D. in 1979 from Harvard University, where she was a Danforth Fellow. She was selected as the Danforth Foundation's representative to the Aspen Institute for Humanisms' Executive Seminar. Miller taught at Yale University's School of Organization and Management for seven years. During the following five years she served as assistant and associate dean for the MBA programs at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Miller is the editor of the journal Small Group Research. In 1992, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she is an organizational consultant on cross-cultural communications and managing diversity. Miller is the faculty director of the UCLA Anderson Women’s Leadership Institute.