Herman Miller, Inc., is more than just a legal entity.
It combines the talents, hopes, and dreams of thousands of people. At its best, it is a high-performance, values-driven community of people tied together by a common purpose. Herman Miller has always stood apart from the crowd because of what we believed, and we have always believed that what we stand for matters. Our strategies will change as the needs of our business change. Our core values will not. We build our business on them. How well we live up to these values will determine whether we are to be trusted by others.

Making a Meaningful Contribution to Our Customers

The mere exchange of goods and services for money is not enough for us. We have a higher aim―to make a meaningful contribution to the people we serve.
We must know more about the work environment and potential solutions than anyone else. Knowledge about a customer's needs, problems, and aspirations is a necessary foundation. This knowledge alone, however, is insufficient. We want our products and services to meet customer needs, providing solutions to their problems, enabling them to reach their aspirations. Simply put, the business that understands the diverse needs of its customers, and meets those needs best, will win. We want to be that company.

Cultivating Community, Participation and People Development

We value community because of the strength and power that comes from uniting thousands of individuals, with truly diverse perspectives, opinions, skills, and backgrounds, in a common purpose. We welcome our suppliers, dealers, customers, designers, and other partners into this community. Through our diversity, united in a common purpose, we become a creative and flexible organization that adjusts rapidly to market changes.

We are a community built on competence and performance. We value community because we know that together we are more than the sum of our parts. Together we can make a contribution that we cannot make on our own. Each of us becomes something better, something richer, by participating in this community.

For 50 years, participation has been central to Herman Miller. It still is. We believe in participation because we value and benefit from the richness of ideas and opinions of thousands of people.
Participation enables employee-owners to contribute their unique gifts and abilities to the corporate community. We believe that employee-owners have the obligation to contribute in their area of competence. Through participation, we serve our customers better.

Believing in the inherent worth of the people who make up this community, we realize the most important investment we make as a corporation is in developing the gifts, talents, and abilities of our employee-owners. We want them to develop new skills that will allow them to increase their contribution to the business. When we as a corporation invest in developing people, we are investing in our future. We want employee-owners to take charge of their careers, growing, building critical skills, and continuously improving. Ultimately, we believe in developing people because we are both serious about business and serious about people.

Creating Economic Value for Investors and Employee-Owners

We believe in employee ownership. We think owners make better employees. When we create value for investors, we are creating it for ourselves. The results of creating economic value are increased security, confidence, and opportunity. When our investors win, we all win. As a public company, we made a promise to our investors to create economic value. This requires us to be good stewards of our human and financial resources. Focusing on creating economic value helps us judge the value of potential investments and guides our continuous-improvement efforts. It is a promise made, and a promise that must be kept.

Responding to Change Through Design and Innovation

Throughout our history, with help from people like George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames, and many others, we have met the challenge of change through design. We start with the real world, with real people, and with real problems. Design is about solving those real-world problems. Always seeking to improve and, at its best, surprise, design enables us to leap to radically new places with entirely new solutions. Design can and should be reflected in all that we do. All of us can design solutions that improve our products, our services, and our business. Great design leads to new insight, understanding and innovation. Through good design we serve our customers better than anyone else.

Living with Integrity and Respecting The Environment

We believe in doing what we say we will do, and doing what is right. We live with integrity because we believe it is the only way to do business. In a company filled with people who do what they say they will do, we can keep the promises we make to our customers, our investors, and each other.

We have a responsibility to the environment and to the communities in which we live and work. We want to reinvent the way goods are made and services are delivered, eliminating the waste and inefficiencies that degrade our environment and reduce the value we offer to customers. At Herman Miller, respecting the environment is more than just good business practice―it is the right thing to do.

A Different kind of Company

Defining who we are and how we are different from other companies is important to us. These values define our differences and give meaning to our work. They begin to describe what we mean by the "Herman Miller way." Our future depends on how well we live out these fundamental values. As we do business in an increasingly competitive environment, will our deeds match our words? We believe that if these values become second nature to us and guide our actions, we will deliver extraordinary value to our customers. And if we make a meaningful contribution to their businesses and their lives, we will flourish and thrive.