From Theatre Kid to Sales Leader

Carmen Sederino started our conversation on Beyond the Keynote by asking about my name, and I told her the real story: three days into my first job, I forwarded an email meant for another James Miller — my manager, James W. — flagging what I thought was a payroll discrepancy. By that afternoon, I had a new name, and it stuck for good.

We traced my path from local theater — I played young Patrick in Mame at eleven, then Tiny Tim the winter after — through a communication and philosophy degree that was supposed to lead to law school, until an internship in the Clinton White House convinced me lawyers weren't having any fun. I ended up in a research lab studying how groups build trust online right as the internet was starting, which somehow turned into a job as a sales engineer at a 26-person startup. Six years later that company, Vignette, had 6,000 employees and a $9 billion valuation. I told Carmen about the time I volunteered to demo our software in Spanish to a client in Mexico City, having taken six years of college Spanish, and discovered mid-demo that nobody had ever taught me the Spanish word for "browser." The client appreciated the effort more than the fluency, and it taught me that being visibly human, mistakes and all, builds more trust than pretending to be polished.

We spent real time on preparation — I start building a keynote three or four months out, and I've learned it's harder to say something well in six minutes than in sixty. That discipline is exactly what I'm applying to my upcoming TEDx talk, Reclaiming Our Humanity in the Age of the Algorithm, which grew out of a strange personal experience: I made a Facebook page for my four-person rooftop garden in Chicago, and the algorithm somehow decided I was a vegan food influencer. I started getting shipments of vegan kimchi and cookies from companies hoping I'd feature them. It's a funny story, but it's also the whole thesis of the talk — the algorithm gets things wrong constantly, and the antidote is putting real humans back into the decisions that matter.