Chapter One

Poor value is a people problem. -Larry Miles

Lawrence Delos Miles was born in 1904 to Delos Miles, a public school superintendent, and Vinetta Miles, an elementary school teacher in Harvard, Nebraska. Miles was very bright, and he graduated from high school in three years rather than the usual four. He attended Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska, with a degree in education. In 1925, he was a teacher and high school principal in Winnebago, Nebraska. In 1926, he made a career change and moved into banking. Dissatisfied with this, he returned to college to study engineering. In 1931, Miles graduated from the College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska with a degree in electrical engineering.

In 1932, Miles began a long and productive career at General Electric Co. in Schenectady, New York. His first assignment at GE was that of a design engineer in the Vacuum Tube Engineering Department. Over a six-year period in this position, he earned 12 patents for vacuum tubes and related circuitry. During this time, Miles developed awareness for unnecessary costs and began seeing the need for developing better ways of doing things.

This sensitivity to cost earned him a transfer to GE's purchasing department, and in 1938 he was promoted to the position of purchasing engineer. During this time, Miles worked closely with vendors to reduce costs associated with electronic components, eventually moving on to precision-machined parts. In 1944, Miles was transferred to a subsidia