Anthony Mills (American Management Consultant)

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Anthony Mills

Charles Anthony Mills (born January 13, 1965) is an American management consultant, entrepreneur, and author whose work has focused extensively on innovation and new product development. He has been a pioneer in the field known as Strategic Innovation (innovation pursued with strategic intentionality and with highly intelligent and capable approaches), as well as what he refers to as Applied Business Innovation (versus theoretical concepts about innovation), which has as its focus delivering real, measurable results for the business that produce an impact on both it and the markets it serves.

Mills’ writing, consulting, and teaching work have focused on showing businesses how to pursue innovation strategically and likewise how to make innovation an ongoing core competency within the business so that it is capable of producing a consistently steady stream of new innovations year after year (what has been referred to as Innovation 2.0). The stated goal of such a focus and competency is to enable a business to become the undisputed driver of the markets and industries it has chosen to address, and as a result, to achieve significant growth and extensive market presence, ensuring its ongoing relevance in each market and its long-term resilience to change over time. This is based on the well-documented fact that businesses who fail to do so will over time become increasingly irrelevant and ultimately die off.

Mills’ work has been firmly anchored in the many years that he spent working in industry, where he followed a path that focused largely on product innovation. This experience spanned a number of progressive roles moving from Product Design Engineer to Engineering Manager to Director of Engineering to Vice President of New Product Development, and likewise spanned a number of different industries, including pharmaceuticals, utilities, automotive, recreational products, life-science and medical equipment, and consumer appliances.

Early life and family

Mills was born in Martinsville, Virginia, the younger of two sons. His father, William Albert Mills, Sr, was an Evangelical Christian pastor, and his mother, Edith Ruth Adams, a homemaker and part-time secretary and bookkeeper. As a young boy, Mills grew up in a highly conservative Evangelical Christian home, moving around between different towns and cities in Western North Carolina owing to his father’s frequent reassignments as a pastor to different churches in that region.

In 1976, at the age of 11, and while living in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mills’ father unexpectedly passed away of post-operative complications at the age of 37. His mother moved the family to Greenville, North Carolina to be closer to their extended family spread throughout Eastern North Carolina. There he attended Junius H. Rose High School, graduating in 1983.

While in high school, Mills was very active in Concert Bank, Marching Band, and Jazz Band, and worked a job in retail at a Roses department store. His high school years were very formative, being raised by a single mother who during that time was having to work two jobs in order to support the family, and thus being left to his own to find influences broadly from peers and other sources.

From 1983 to 1988 Mills attended North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina where he majored in Mechanical Engineering and minored in Computer Science. After receiving his undergraduate degree, Mills stayed on at NCSU from 1989 to 1991 to pursue a graduate degree in Mechanical Engineering with a concentration in Acoustics. While in graduate school, Mr. Mills participated extensively in NCSU’s Leadership Development Series (LDS), an ongoing series of workshops and courses focusing on differing aspects of business and professional performance, where he ultimately won a scholarship for his participation.

Later education and executive development

From 2000 – 2004, while working at Johnson Controls Automotive in Holland, Michigan, Mills took courses toward, and eventually earned, a masters degree in Management from Aquinas College, a small Catholic liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Mills stated that he preferred such a program over traditional MBA programs because it placed a far greater emphasis on leadership and the human elements of business, rather than what Mills perceived to be the cold and lifeless focus on the more financial aspects of business. Mills had for a long time held the view that businesses and workplaces needed to be more “human” in nature, and that most MBA programs simply did not reflect this point of view.

Mills also recognized that the aim of most MBA programs was to reinforce the managerial skills needed to perpetuate and optimize the current practices and states of affair of a business, and were inherently at odds therefore with the pursuit of long-term innovation of the types needed to constantly renew and occasionally reinvent businesses. As a result, Mills’ observation had been that the vast majority of MBA graduates were well prepared to optimize the short-term performance of a business, but extremely ill-prepared to be able to lead those same businesses into the great unknowns of their futures. This was yet another reason that he chose an alternative program over a traditional MBA.

In 2010 and 2011, while serving as the Vice President of Product Development at Bio-Chem Fluidics, Mills was nominated and selected to participate the Halma Executive Development Programme (HEDP), sponsored by Halma plc, Bio-Chem Fluidics’ parent company. Hosted once each year, this program brought together a cohort of executives from across the entire portfolio of Halma companies (nearly 50 businesses) to participate in three one-week special training sessions. The first two of these sessions, spread about nine months apart, focused on business leadership and were held at Ashridge Business School just outside of London, England. The third session, also about nine months after the prior session, focused on international business and was held at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad, India. Mills considered this programme, especially its final session in India, to be quite transformational for him, deeply reinforcing many of the “human workplace” beliefs he had held previously.

Career

1983 – 1991: College

During his first two years in college Mills worked a series of odd jobs to support himself, including Work-Study assignments in an electronics lab and later a machine shop on the NCSU campus. During the summers he worked in retail back at his high school job at Roses and as a brick masonry assistant working for his maternal grandfather Herman Adams on masonry jobs in Eastern North Carolina.

In his junior year at NCSU, Mills began working a series of Cooperative Education jobs where the work was clearly engineering in nature. The first of these was as an Assistant Pipe Hanger Inspection Engineer at Carolina Power & Light Company (later renamed Progress Energy Inc., now a part of Duke Energy) in the NRC 79-14 Pipe Hanger Inspection Group (contracted to Daniels Construction Company) during construction of Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant (SHNPP) (New Hill, North Carolina). The second of these was as a Project Engineer at Burroughs Wellcome Company (later a part of Glaxo Wellcome which subsequently became part of Glaxo Smith Kline), where his focus was primarily on researching, specifying, purchasing, and having installed various pieces of process and manufacturing equipment, both in the company’s production facilities and in its research and development labs.

From working these two co-op jobs, Mills quickly realized that his passion and calling lay not in general engineering work, but rather in new product development work. A part of his motivation for pursuing a graduate degree therefore was to help ensure landing a job of that nature.

While in graduate school, Mills supported himself by working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (TA) in NCSU’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department, where he taught Mechanical Engineering lab courses to junior and senior undergraduates.

1991 – 1994: Post Graduate School / Immersion into the Auto Industry

Following his graduation from graduate school in May of 1991, Mills moved to Michigan, where he went to work as a Product Design Engineer at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. He was part of a cohort of new hires placed into the Ford College Graduate Program (FCGP), which allowed him to spend his first two years working in a series of six rotational assignments each lasting from three to four months in duration. His six assignments focused on body structural engineering (using Finite Element Analysis), Front End and Underbody Design, Sound Quality Engineering, Advanced Suspension Design, Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH) R&D, and Program Management / Vehicle Launch (launching the newly redesigned 1993 Ford Ranger at Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant in Louisville, Kentucky). This program thus imparted to Mills a broad understanding of the automotive industry and all the work that went into it.

Following the Ford College Graduate Program, Mills returned to his home department of Body Engineering / Advanced Engineering (structural analysis and design), where he spent one additional year. Toward the end of this year Mills was informed that he had been chosen to pursue a management track at Ford, and that he would be prepped accordingly for doing that.

1994 – 1995: Interlude

In the spring of 1994 however, Mills – citing personal reasons stemming from a prior relationship with a former girlfriend – left his career at Ford Motor Company and moved back to North Carolina where he went to work as a Youth Counselor at Cameron Boys Camp (Cameron, North Carolina), a therapeutic camping program for troubled teenage boys run by the Baptist Children’s Home of North Carolina (Thomasville, North Carolina). Mills secured this job through the organization Intercristo (which later merged with ChristianJobs.com).

Known as “Chief Tony” at camp, Mills worked with the 13 and 14 year-old group, called “The Woodsmen”. Besides time at camp, this job involved several offsite camping trips and month-long canoeing trips, including on the Oconee River in Georgia and the Suwannee River in Florida.

Though Mills’ original intention was to spend two years working at the camp, he eventually decided to depart after serving for only one year

1996 – 1998: Technology Imperatives – Consulting Take 1

In January 1996 Mills opened the management consulting firm Technology Imperatives Inc. based in Cary, North Carolina. As a part of this, he spent time travelling and speaking up and down the east coast of the U.S. with a partner firm, Mallett Technology, based in Durham, North Carolina.

In 1997, while running Technology Imperatives, Mills authored the first-ever book on the subject of collaborative product development (known more commonly at the time as “collaborative engineering”). The book, Collaborative Engineering and the Internet: Linking Product Development Partners via the Web, was published in 1998 by SME (then known as the Society of Manufacturing Engineers) in Dearborn, Michigan.

Being in the pre-Internet days however, Mills struggled to market the work of Technology Imperatives, and finding it unsustainable as a solo entrepreneur, chose to close the firm in the spring of 1998.

1998 – 2007: Back to the World of Automotive

In June of 1998 Mills moved back to Michigan, this time to West Michigan rather than to the Detroit area, where he took a job as a Product Engineer at Johnson Controls (JCI) Automotive. There he worked in the company’s Ford Overhead Products (OHP) Group where for the first two years he led the development of new vehicle interior systems for Ford Motor Company’s vehicles. His main assignments involved the development of a new overhead system for the 2001 Lincoln Town Car / Mercury Grand Marquis / Ford Crown Victoria featuring new built-in energy-absorbing countermeasures required to meet the newly-enacted FMVSS 201 head impact criteria – an industry first, and development of JCI’s AutoVision DVD Family Entertainment System, an overhead DVD entertainment system that was also an industry-first and eventually adapted into a number of American and Japanese car models, including the 2004 Ford Explorer which Mills also worked on. In this role Mr. Mills served as the primary technical liaison to engineering counterparts at Ford.

From early 2001 to early 2006, Mills served as an Engineering Manager in this same group at JCI, leading an engineering team in servicing a broad array of interiors projects for Ford, and acting as a more senior level liaison to the engineering leadership at Ford, including working with his commercial and financial counterparts to quote new projects to Ford. A particularly challenging launch for his team during this time was that of the redesigned Lincoln LS, which ultimately involved his spending an extended period of time on site at Ford’s Wixom Assembly Plant. While in this role, Mills was instrumental in the development of an innovative new sunvisor design that was eventually sold to numerous OEMs, implemented a number of engineering process improvements that resulted in substantially reduced product revalidation testing and post-release engineering changes, and authored a number of comprehensive product design guides for different new products he had pioneered. He also took on a number of different skunkworks initiatives of his own choosing, resulting in an improved fastener design and added knowledge in JCI’s engineering knowledgebase.

In his final year at JCI (mid-2006 to mid-2007) Mills joined an elite team of Engineering Specialists, where he was trained as a Black Belt in Design for Six Sigma (DfSS). There he took on the role of a floating internal consultant working with a wide range of product development teams across the company to apply the statistical methods of DfSS to solving particularly difficult design challenges and to making the company’s products yet more robust.

2007 – 2014: New Product Development Executive – Bicycles & Microfluidics

In 2007, after an extensive 3-year search for an appealing role in the outdoor recreation industry, Mills left JCI and moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he took on the role of Director of Engineering at Hayes Bicycle Group (HBG), (Mequon, Wisconsin), a division of HB Performance Systems Inc. (HBPSI, formerly Hayes Brake, now Hayes Performance Systems). When Mills was brought into this role, the business was deep in the throes of a major acquisition spree in which it had acquired several other bicycle component manufacturers, namely Answer Products, Manitou, SUNringlé, and Wheelsmith. With the company relocating the operations of those businesses from California, Indiana, and Montana, respectively, to Wisconsin it lost most of the engineering staffs from those businesses. Consequently, Mills was forced to have to rebuild a new and more comprehensive engineering and product development department from the ground up, recruiting and training a number of new managers, designers, and engineers.

Mills also found the company to be well behind its counterparts in the automotive industry in terms of engineering and manufacturing discipline and capability. Consequently, he was instrumental in introducing many of the Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) practices and disciplines of the automotive industry into this business, substantially improving both its business practices and its product quality. He was similarly instrumental in streamlining the company’s engineering release and change practices by replacing manual paper-based processes with electronic workflows.

So as to overcome historical animosity between the remaining staffs of the different companies and in order to promote good cohesion in the organization’s new product development efforts, Mills cast a compelling vision for this group and then trained them in world-class product development practices. As a result, this group was able to bring all of its new 2008 products to market on time, and with proper validation.

While in this role, Mills was instrumental in helping to define and develop a revolutionary new hydraulic remote suspension lock-out product, as well as to redesign certain of the company’s products to avoid patent infringement with SRAM Corporation, a major competitor. He also took on and managed a product recall effort with the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) after it was found that a skewer the company had sourced from Taiwan had material defects, resolving the issue through a rapid-response recall campaign.

In 2008, after only a year in this role, the company’s Board of Directors reneged on its commitment to the bicycle division, which had been to allow it to execute a three-year strategy to regain profitability. Instead it replaced the division’s General Manager with a new GM and gave him the ultimatum to achieve profitability within less than one year, forcing him to ultimately have to lay off the entire new staff the prior GM had hired on the previous year, including Mills. This was predicated in part by this Board recognizing the early warning signs of the impending economic recession which began in 2008 and climaxed in 2009.

After a six-month hiatus searching for a new role during the most difficult season of the Great Recession, Mills eventually, in early 2009, relocated to New Jersey where he took on the role of Vice President of Engineering and New Product Development at Bio-Chem Fluidics (Boonton, New Jersey), a specialty manufacturer of high-precision chemically-inert valves and pumps used in the medical, clinical diagnostic, and analytical chemistry equipment markets, and a holding of Halma plc, based in Amersham, England.

Mills spent four years in this role, from 2009 to 2013, during which time he helped the business to significantly improve and streamline its Sales, Application Engineering, and NPD processes, as well as bring its Product Management practices into the light by developing and championing a rolling Product Roadmap based in part on the business’ R&D efforts. He also led the business in developing and launching a number of innovative and profitable new product lines, including amongst others, an electric rotary valve line, a completely redesigned “038” isolation valve line, and a high-flow-rate valve line, all of which allowed the business to realize significant revenue and profit growth. He similarly championed a number of strategic partnerships with complimentary firms in Europe, the US, and Asia, commercializing two of these with partners in France and one with a partner in California to market and sell their products under the BCF brand portfolio.

In 2013 Mills, citing differences in management philosophies between himself and the company’s new President, chose to leave BCF and return to West Michigan to pursue other interests.

2013: Transitions… the Beginnings of Something New

Having long been influenced by the work of the design and innovation firm IDEO, Mills began contemplating, at the start of 2013, the launch of such a new business of his own. He envisioned this to be a full-service innovation firm whose services would span upfront user, design, and market research to qualify and refine concepts, as well as the product design and engineering services to develop those concepts into real offerings (whether products, services, customer experiences, or business models). He spent the first several months of that year researching and contemplating where to launch this business, and at one point he and his wife had decided upon Cincinnati, Ohio for doing so. However, at about that same time, a number of Mills’ former colleagues in West Michigan expressed to him an interest in launching this business with him, and implored him to return to West Michigan to pursue it, a request that he ultimately agreed to.

That summer, Mills hosted a business concepting workshop in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan with six other individuals, each a prospective partner in the business, and each having different skillsets such as Sales, Industrial Design, Electrical Engineering, Project Management, and so forth. The business he had conceived was tentatively to be called White Birch Design Group and he proposed bootstrapping its launch using a process known as Rollovers as Business Start-ups, or ROBS. This would have required each of these individuals, some of whom were stably employed in good careers at the time, others of whom were in transition, to commit to leaving their careers or investing significant time and retirement savings into launching the new venture. Though the energy at this workshop was palpably high, each of these prospective partners ultimately decided, for a variety of reasons, to not move forward with joining in the venture, dropping out one by one throughout that fall, leaving Mills back at ground zero and alone.

It was out of this experience that at the end of 2013 Mills decided to move forward on his own, but to modify the business concept somewhat to place a heavier emphasis on management consulting around strategy and world-class innovation practices. The business would therefore be an even more full-service operation than before, offering both hands-on innovation and design services via Mills’ extended network, as well as innovation management consulting services. Mills took the name “Legacy Innovation Group” for the business, because his envisioned intent for the business was to help its clients leave a “legacy of innovation the world would remember”, being inspired as he was by the innovators and rebels who had in fact left just such a legacy, as so well immortalized in Apple’s 1997 Think Different ad (“Here’s to the crazy ones…”) narrated by American actor Richard Dreyfuss.

2013 – 2016: Direct to Consumer – Whirlpool Corporation

In coming back to West Michigan to explore business options with his prospective business partners, and then later choosing to launch a business on his own, Mills was not yet ready to jump directly into the fray head first with no ramp up or safety net.

And so it was that in the summer of 2013 Mills took a position with Whirlpool Corporation in Benton Harbor, Michigan, approximately one hours’ drive south of Grand Rapids. Having spent a large portion of his career working in Tier 1 businesses, Mills had a strong desire to spend some time working in a very consumer-oriented OEM business, and Whirlpool fit that bill to a T. The primary role he took on – a part of Whirlpool’s Engineering Group – focused on leading teams in pursuing advanced product and technology innovations for Whirlpools’ Fabric Care Division.

Mills found that, to his delight, Whirlpool permitted him significant latitude and flexibility in how he executed his role, in terms of work location and work schedule. For one thing, Mills was able to bounce around all over Whirlpool’s Benton Harbor / St.Joseph campus and work from a variety of locations, including many offsite locations whenever he could. More importantly however, this allowed Mills to simultaneously launch Legacy Innovation Group while still working at Whirlpool and manage his time and presence between the two, taking on select client engagements that he could manage under this arrangement. Mills operated under this arrangement up until the fall of 2015, for a total of 21 months.

Also while at Whirlpool, Mills went on to lead an informal skunkworks team in conceiving, researching, presenting, and defending what would ultimately become a completely new product category for Whirlpool, targeted at an entirely new market for Whirlpool. The product his team conceived, using all of the research and design processes that he had developed for Legacy Innovation Group, was a homebrewing appliance for brewing beer targeted not at current home brewers, but rather at craft beer enthusiasts who wanted to wet their toes into homebrewing in an easy and pain-free manner – a product which the market timing was right for given the explosive growth of the craft beer industry over the first two decades of the 21^st Century. This was clearly a white space opportunity for Whirlpool. Originally called RevolutionBrew, the product was conceived to be a compact sub-three-gallon modular unit with separate brewing and fermenting devices that could each be tucked away into a small space when not in use, and that were otherwise unobtrusive in one’s home, and which could also be accessorized with an optional tap. After championing this concept through multiple rounds of approvals inside of Whirlpool North America, including gaining support to undertake formal market research and financial forecasting for it, Mills finally got the green light to have the concept move into formal development. This eventually culminated in a product that Whirlpool’s New Business Creation business unit took to market under the brand name Vessi.

2014 – 2015: The Early Days of Legacy Innovation Group

Mills formally launched Legacy Innovation Group LLC (LIG) in January of 2014 while working at Whirlpool Corporation and for nearly the next two years engaged in a variety of small projects with clients, all while still working for Whirlpool.

In the fall of 2015, following the completion of the engineering development of a major new high-end washing machine that Mills had been involved in, Mills left Whirlpool Corporation and ventured out into making Legacy Innovation Group his full-time vocation. By that time Mills had conducted extensive research into innovation practices from around the world and had consequently developed a number of outstanding proprietary innovation methods and frameworks.

The Legacy Innovation Group practice reflected this, and as such was divided into three practice areas…

1. Discovery – helping businesses explore their white space so as to uncover lucrative new innovation opportunities (as had been done for Whirlpool Corporation’s New Business Creation business unit).
2. Design – developing the new products, services, customer experiences, business models, and brands that businesses needed to capitalize on those new opportunities.
3. Management – the management consulting arm of LIG, which focused on helping businesses develop winning Innovation Strategies and then become consistently innovative on their own so that they themselves could repeatedly replicate the things that LIG was doing for them.

In January of 2016, as an extension of his highly-regarded work at Legacy Innovation Group, Mills was retained to serve as the Executive Director of the Global Innovation Institute, a role that borrowed heavily from his world-leading work at LIG and that subsequently took him all over the world.

2016 – Present: GInI | Global Innovation Institute

In January of 2016, as a result of his demonstrated knowledge and skill in both business innovation and association management, Mills was asked to assume the position of Executive Director of the Global Innovation Institute (GInI), which he did while also continuing to run the strategic innovation consulting firm Legacy Innovation Group.

In his capacity at GInI, Mills was instrumental in leading the Institute in the development of its professional certification program and the associated training materials, as well as in the development of its organizational accreditation program and the associated assessment tools. He was likewise instrumental in leading the Institute in compiling and publishing a comprehensive (nearly 900 page) body of knowledge reference book called the Applied Innovation Master Book, a mandatory resource for pursuing any of the Institute’s professional certifications.

Mills has also been extremely instrumental in growing GInI’s network of Authorized Providers around the world, a feat that has enabled the Institute to achieve significant penetration into a large number of the world’s industrialized nations. Similarly, Mills has been instrumental in helping GInI to forge special partnerships around the world for taking its certification program deeper into key markets via regional language translations, targeting such languages as Arabic and Mandarin / Simplified Chinese.

Under Mils’ leadership, GInI has continued to experience significant growth around the world, with particularly strong pockets in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Involvement in professional societies

While an undergraduate student at North Carolina State University, Mills was very active in a number of student chapters of various professional societies. This included the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE International), where he served as Secretary for one year. Mills was also an active member of the national Mechanical Engineering honor fraternity Pi Tau Sigma. In 1987, as part of his involvement with NSPE, Mills undertook the Order of the Engineer oath ceremony, which involves a stainless ring worn on one’s right pinky finger.

While a graduate student, Mills joined a number of additional technical societies relating to his graduate research work. These included the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), in whose journal, JASA, Mills eventually published two technical papers stemming from his graduate research work, the North Carolina Acoustical Society (NCAS, from whom Mills was awarded a scholarship for his graduate research work), and the Audio Engineering Society (AES).

From 1996 – 1998, while running the consulting firm Technology Imperatives, Mills was a member of the Society of Concurrent Engineering (SOCE), which later renamed itself the Society of Concurrent Product Development (SCPD), but Mills was never particularly active in this smaller niche society.

Following the publication of his 1998 book Collaborative Engineering by SME, Mills went on to serve as a volunteer member of the Board of Advisors of the Computer and Automated Systems Association of SME (CASA/SME), where he chaired and organized all of its Technical Forums for the years 1999 to 2001. He also authored two blue books for CASA/SME, the first, Collaborative Engineering as an element of the Integrated Manufacturing Enterprise, was released in the fall of 1999, while the second, Manufacturing Enterprise Leadership: Insights for Adaptation and Survival in the 21^st Century, was released in the summer of 2000 and went on to receive the association’s “blue book of the year award” for that year. Mills also coauthored, together with other members of the CASA/SME Board, CASA/SME’s annual Technology Trends Document for the years 1999 and 2000.

From 2002 – 2010 Mills took a hiatus from being actively involved in professional societies while he focused on establishing his marriage and a new family.

From 2011 - 2013, while living in New Jersey, Mills became active in the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), an organization he had been aware of for many years but had never participated in. During these two years he served as the Vice President of Marketing for the New York / New Jersey chapter of PDMA. Since this chapter held most of its events in New York City, this afforded him the opportunity to meet and network with a number of well-known and influential people in the NPD circle, including, amongst others, Howard Moskowitz and Steven Haines.

During this same time Mills was also able to spend considerable time visiting with vibrant new startups in New York City through the NewCo Festival and other connections.

From late 2014 – late 2015 Mills helped to relaunch the West Michigan Chapter of PDMA, serving as the chapter’s President, where he built up a highly effective Board of Advisors whom he subsequently led in putting together a well-received program of speakers and panels for the West Michigan product development and innovation community.

From 2015 – 2016 Mills was an active member of the International Association of Innovation Professionals (IAOIP), where in 2015 he was a speaker at the Association’s annual Innova-Con conference in Houston, Texas, and in 2016 contributed to the Association’s body of knowledge on the subject of “Value Creation”.

In 2016 Mills went on to become the Executive Director of the Global Innovation Institute (GInI), where he led the Institute in the development of a comprehensive professional certification program as well as a comprehensive corporate accreditation program, both focusing on applied business innovation. He also served as the Principal Editor of the Institute’s comprehensive body of knowledge book, the Applied Innovation Master Book.

Blogging

In his dual roles as CEO of Legacy Innovation Group and Executive Director of GInI, Mills has authored a large number of well-received blog articles. His articles have appeared on numerous sites around the Web, including on the following sites:

• Innovation Excellence – an exclusive innovation blogging site featuring recognized authorities: www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/author/anthony-mills
• The Innovation Enterprise – an exclusive innovation blogging site: www.theinnovationenterprise.com
• LinkedIn – the world’s largest professional networking platform: www.linkedin.com/in/camills/detail/recent-activity/posts
• Medium – the world’s most regarded social publishing platform: www.medium.com/search?q=Anthony%20Mills
• Quora – the world’s most recognized question-and-answer dialogue platform: www.quora.com/profile/Anthony-Mills-22/all_posts
• Better Business Focus – a customizable UK based print & online magazine: www.onesmartplace.com/resources/better-business-focus-magazine
• Consult 2050 – an online consultancy brokerage: www.consult2050.com/consultant/anthony-m
• Future Race – the blog site of Legacy Innovation Group, a world-leading strategy and innovation consultancy: www.legacyinnova.com/blog.
• Change Talk – the blog site of LC Global, an international growth and transformation consultancy: www.lc-global-us.com/change-talk/author/anthony-mills-change-and-innovation-consultant
• GInI Blog – the blog site of the Global Innovation Institute, the world’s foremost certification and accreditation body in the field of business innovation: www.gini.org/blog.

In 2018, Mills was recognized as one of Innovation Excellence’s Top 40 Bloggers.

Personal life

Relationship and family

In 2000, while living and working in Holland, Michigan, Mills finally married at the age of 35, taking as his wife Susan Elain Ball (born June 1, 1964), a school teacher and native of West Michigan. Mills and Ball met in the singles group of Central Wesleyan Church in Holland, Michigan.

After trying unsuccessfully to have biological children, the couple eventually chose to adopt two children from Guatemala, and in mid 2004 brought home both a daughter, Caroline Grace Mills (born September 28, 2003) , and a son, Caleb Elijah Mills (born February 14, 2004).

Mills has one brother, William Albert Mills, Jr (born November 28, 1963) who resides in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and serves as the Global Director of Men’s Ministries for the International Pentecostal Holiness Church.

Independence and aversion to labels

Mills has stated that one of his overriding philosophies with respect to religion, politics, nationalism, and other similar affiliations is that he strongly eschews labels. He has stated that he has a very strong aversion to being labeled as one thing or another, owing to people’s prejudgments and biases associated with labels. This stems out of his greater desire for the respect of universal human and civil rights around the world, which touches on matters such as racial equality, gender equality, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, amongst others.

Religious beliefs

With respect to religion, Mills simply describes himself as a devout follower of Jesus Christ and nothing more. His practice is that of an Evangelical Christian. He grew up attending churches affiliated with the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, but later in life eschewed denominations (primarily on account of their prescriptive labels) and instead chose to attend independent, non-denominational churches.

For many years Mills has been affiliated with Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, the church founded by the well-known Christian activist and author Rob Bell.

Political views

With respect to politics, Mills is registered as an Independent. He has stated that he believes the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States are both overly tied to special interest groups, and as a result neither reflects a properly balanced perspective that optimally serves the interest of the overall population in a balanced manner.

With respect to nationalism, Mills generally sees such allegiances are being on par with religions, and thus as pseudo-religious in nature, placing them in direct conflict with his Christian allegiance. He has stated that, though he greatly appreciates and values the freedom and liberty that come from free societies, and likewise greatly respects the price that has at times had to be paid to secure and protect such societies, he nevertheless does not pledge his allegiance to any specific nation, rather he pledges it to societal liberty in general. In this respect, Mills has stated that he sees himself as a global citizen – a citizen of the entire world, but that even this is completely secondary to his citizenship in the Kingdom of God, a view stemming from his Christian beliefs.

References

Direct interview with Anthony Mills, June 03, 2019.

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