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Book on Business Life Explores Spouse’s Role

When last we wrote about Steve Miller, MBA ’68, on the 30th anniversary of his graduation from the Business School, the veteran of corporate turnarounds was in the process of handing off leadership of yet another salvaged corporation so he could resume his retirement building model railroads. As chairman of environmental services company Waste Management, he was expecting a celebration at the next annual meeting, but we learn from his new autobiography that instead Miller found himself among the startled and hushed observers who watched the new CEO enter the hotel ballroom in a wheelchair and incoherently deliver a one-page speech. It turned out that the savior Miller had found for Waste Management had an incurable brain tumor but would not admit it. Restatements of corporate profits followed, and Miller was forced to become temporary CEO.

Such stories in Miller’s book, The Turnaround Kid, are part of what surprised Fortune senior editor Allan Sloan, who writes that he picked up the book expecting to “be bored by the usual braggadocious PowerPoint prose and toss it within 10 minutes. Instead I got hooked on the personal stuff.”

The book begins with another brain tumor, that of Miller’s wife, Maggie, who died in August 2006 while he was furiously negotiating with the United Auto Workers, General Motors, and others to salvage auto parts-maker Delphi. Writing shortly afterward, Miller details not just his business experience with some of America’s most prominent companies but his fiercely loving and sometimes contentious marriage with the person he considered his most reliable mentor about business. “We both believed in hard work, the contributions healthy companies make to communities, and our obligation to help when we can,” he says, adding that it was Maggie who sometimes persuaded him to take on new corporate basket cases.

Although reviled at times in Detroit, where he now lives with his second wife, Miller may well have saved what’s left of Motown’s three automakers, Sloan suggests. That’s because Miller forced the companies and unions to compromise on retirees’ pensions and health care to save Delphi. Given the twists and turns of American business, however, Miller himself is likely to be among those waiting to see what the next chapter brings.