Success Quote by J. Irwin Miller

A businessman arguing that your highest duty is to people who don’t resemble you is a quiet rebuke to the easiest kind of “service”: helping your own and calling it virtue. Miller’s line smuggles a moral hierarchy into a simple sentence. Service is not measured by effort alone; it’s graded by distance. The farther the recipient is from your tribe - culturally, economically, politically - the more your help counts, because it requires you to surrender the perks of comfort, familiarity, and self-congratulation.

The subtext is about power. In corporate and civic life, “doing good” often doubles as reputation management: philanthropy that circles back to your brand, your neighborhood, your people. Miller flips that logic. If service is primarily directed at those “like yourself,” it risks becoming an investment in the status quo. Serving those unlike you means accepting that the beneficiary may not share your tastes, gratitude script, or worldview - and that’s precisely the point. It tests whether your ethics are contingent on recognition.

Context matters: Miller led Cummins Engine and became known for civic-minded leadership in Columbus, Indiana, including architecture and public initiatives that drew national attention. Mid-century America was wrestling with civil rights, labor, and rapid economic stratification - arenas where business leaders could either entrench inequity or spend political capital to widen opportunity. Read that way, the quote isn’t soft humanism; it’s a directive to take the harder meeting, fund the less photogenic program, hire beyond the usual networks, and accept some backlash. It’s a standard for leadership that can’t be satisfied by charity alone.