Rage Against the Political Machine

After earning an undergraduate degree in philosophy and a PhD in mathematics, Miller spent 15 years as an executive with General Motors. After a stint with Rockwell, he led another engineering firm before taking his current position as CEO of APX.

Miller's worldview revolves around concentric circles of teams. In the inner circle is the company itself. The GM where he began his career three decades ago, he says, was "a bureaucracy, not very much different from the federal government, with incredible amounts of study and restudy and re-restudy and nobody with authority." Today, he says, the imperative of quick response demands that companies move from vertical to horizontal organizations that diffuse authority and instill in their workers a greater personal commitment to success.

In the next circle is the community of other companies working as suppliers to the auto industry. Here the traditional model was also vertical: lanes of competitors racing against each other. But Miller insists that the horizontal connections - the common stake of all the companies in improving quality -- are just as important. For the past decade, he has preached that even competitors have a common interest in increasing the overall efficiency of the domestic auto industry. "We are all codependent here," Miller says.

That perspective leads Miller to the final circle: teams built between business and community institutions to tackle problems that the free market alone can't resolve. "Philosophically, I think government should be smaller," Miller says. "I believe that diffusing power to lower and lower levels in any organization is consistently the better philosophy. But government cannot abdicate. There are things that only government can do. We have to make distinctions between what the market is capable of doing and what requires government action."

During the 1980s, Michigan's governor, Democrat James Blanchard, recruited Miller, Carlson, and other like-minded entrepreneurs into efforts to build new public-private partnerships to restore the state's competitiveness. After Republican John Engler defeated Blanchard in 1990, Doug Ross, who had been a principal architect of Blanchard's economic agenda as Michigan commerce secretary, transplanted the network into Michigan Future Inc., a bustling volunteer organization directed by Miller, Carlson, and Rick Inatome.

Michigan Future now organizes some 2,000 business executives, educators, and local government officials behind an array of projects, from promoting exports to opening their own charter schools for technical education. Their signature project, which has gone on to become an independent organization, is an alliance known as the Auto Body Consortium.

The consortium originally brought eight small and midsize auto supply companies (including Carlson's and Miller's) together with GM, Chrysler, and the University of Michigan in a joint research project to reduce the variation in auto body construction, lowering costs and raising quality. The project, which pooled $7 million from the companies with a $5 million federal grant, ended last September. The results were so encouraging that a larger group of suppliers joined with two universities and all of the Big Three manufacturers to win a follow-up federal grant to reduce variations in the stamping of auto body parts.

These experiences have converted Carlson -- a 52-year-old GM alumnus -- into an evangelist for federal investment in research. The consortium's experiences, he says, refute the Cyber-Libertarian claim that government dollars subsidize only projects that can't make the corporate cut. No single company could have assembled a project that crossed so many organizational boundaries, both public and private. Without federal dollars -- and perhaps more important, federal encouragement -- the cooperative research "absolutely would not" have happened, Carlson says. "I know because I tried to make it happen for 20 years in Michigan -- and never could do it."

As the Techno-Communitarians are quick to point out, the best example of the value of public investments may be the computer industry itself. The Internet sits atop the ARPANET that the Defense Department began building in the late 1960s to study how the military could communicate after a nuclear war. "To me the Internet is still the ARPANET," says Debi Coleman, chairman and CEO of Merix Corp., an Oregon-based electronic interconnect company. "Show me the Henry Ford who went out and built the Internet."