OR/MS Today - October 1998 - Q & A with Mark Doherty

October 1998

New Executive Director returns to his roots

When Mark Doherty was named executive director of INFORMS in August, it marked an amazing confluence of professional interests for the Chicago native who earned a graduate degree in operations research and practiced OR/MS before migrating to association management.

"I feel like I'm returning home to family," Doherty said at the time of his appointment by the INFORMS Board of Directors. "Operations research and the management sciences gave me a tremendous head start and real advantage in my career. Now, I have the opportunity to return the favor to the profession."

Doherty succeeds Randy Robinson, who announced his retirement earlier this year (see OR/MS Today, August 1998).

A one-time member of TIMS (which merged with ORSA to create INFORMS), Doherty launched his OR/MS career as an analyst with the Cincinnati Police Department in the 1970s.

After his career veered into association management, Doherty served as executive director of the Actuarial Education & Research Fund in Schaumburg, Ill., as director of research for the Society of Actuaries in Schaumburg, and, most recently, as COO of the Cardiology Research Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Doherty holds an MBA in Finance from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and a master's degree in Statistics and Operations Research from Xavier University in Cincinnati. OR/MS Today editor Peter Horner interviewed Doherty in late August just weeks after he began his new job.

What are your first impressions of INFORMS? How well is it meeting the professional needs of its members?

I see an organization that is highly academic in nature, one that is driven by very dedicated volunteer members and leadership. What I would like to see is more of the practitioner side. Now I know there are military people and others on the practitioner side who are very active. I haven't had a chance to get to know them yet. But really what I see is a society that is the learned body, if you will, of the OR/MS profession. It is evolving and growing, and that's exciting.

Randy Robinson has taken it through the very difficult period of melding two organizations together. As I recall from his interview (OR/MS Today, August 1998), he said that now it was time for someone who is more of an association professional to take it to the next level. I am an association manager, but I am also fortunate to have OR/MS in my background. This to me, then, is a marvelous confluence of my academic and early OR/MS practitioner background as well as what I feel I am good at, which is professional and scientific society management.

I understand you were once a member of TIMS.

Yes, I was. I was introduced to TIMS by a colleague at the Mitre Corporation, back in my practitioner days. In the practitioner world, that's often how a person joins an organization such as TIMS and now INFORMS — someone introduces them. I was a TIMS member for quite a few years, from the mid-1970s through the mid-80s.

So what were your impressions of TIMS from the other side, as a member?

At the time I was working for a federally funded research and development center. What you had there was a bunch of highly educated people doing interesting and often secret projects. As a result, they had a quasi-academic bend to them because they had come through a graduate program and they naturally wanted to continue learning.

The learning process is sort of ingrained in you as you go through graduate school. I was introduced to the concept of writing papers and giving talks. TIMS seemed to be the type of organization that fit with what I was doing professionally, and they were holding meetings in interesting places. It kept you in touch with what was going on, kept your hand on the pulse of new techniques and new ideas and concepts, and to a certain extent, kept you involved in academia. It was a very posi-tive experience.

You've mentioned the strong academic influence in INFORMS. Some will argue that the scales are tipped too far in favor of academic to the point that it has stifled some of the growth and some of the initiatives that might attract practitioners to INFORMS. Your comments?

I am not sure there is an imbalance. My personal view, which is based on my previous experience and now with INFORMS, is that people who have come through MS/OR training are likely to have a master's degree if not a Ph.D. They have almost a natural desire to continue to learn. I believe what we need to do is to keep pushing our academics to provide more continuing education that will attract the practitioners.

I firmly believe practitioners don't just get out into the world and say, "OK, I've had my training so now I'm done." Practitioners in the OR/MS community are really ripe for continuing education. They want to learn new things. They know that certain tools and skills of theirs are not necessarily as sharp as they were when they were in graduate school. Continuing education is a natural area for us to tap into, and it goes right to our strength as an organization.

In the consulting business we used to talk about SWOT — your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. One of the great strengths INFORMS has is a reservoir of teaching talent to attract practitioners who want to continue to improve their own skill sets so that they can do better for their businesses, their agencies and their clients. We have to build on our strength and take advantage of a great opportunity — helping practitioners do their job better.

Given all those strengths, how does INFORMS market itself to attract those practitioners who, for whatever reason, haven't joined in the same numbers and with the same enthusiasm as those on the academic side?

You raise a very crucial issue. You have to look at market segmentation. For example, what would be the influence factors for people who enter into the consulting business? An opportunity to get their name out in front of potential clients? Something to put on their resume? That sort of opportunity, we have to drive home to these groups. (Marketing Director) Lisa Close and our marketing people are moving in that direction.

I think it is also important that we get the people we already have in consulting to attract their colleagues. I joined TIMS because I had a supervisor who encouraged me. It's one-on-one marketing. We may want to focus market to consultant types in one manner and the corporate types in a different manner. We've encouraged that to a certain extent with the Edelman Award. We have to do more.

It seems to me that you have to make the essence of INFORMS — the meetings and at least some of the journals — relevant to practitioners before they are going to join in large numbers.

I agree. I think Tom Magnanti, our president-elect, is addressing that issue with respect to the meetings. We are beginning to focus on a more listener-based meeting vs. a speaker-based meeting. What we want to do is begin to have a significant-size meeting, perhaps in the spring, that is much more of a listener-based meeting. That would be consistent with what would attract the corporate, consultant, government agency-type person.

I would encourage more practitioner-based articles in, say, OR/MS Today. I think it could be a very strong vehicle to attract the practitioner side. At the same time, we have to have a very strong, highly respected, peer-reviewed set of journals for our academic constituents. If the practitioners can get involved in that, great, and I would encourage them to do so. Or perhaps the academics can write some more practice-oriented papers. But those are issues each of the journals have to come to grips with.

Do you have any goals in terms of membership growth that you discussed with the board during the interview process and now that you are on the job?

One of my personal goals is to see a significant increase in the number of practitioners. I'm thinking that over a five-year period we could double the number of our practitioners. That would be great, adding maybe 3,000 people. As a membership organization, we have to be careful not to set our goals too high. If we got every OR/MS practitioner, we might get 60,000, 80,000 or 100,000 people. But the likelihood of that is very small.

The real questions are, What is our base out there and what niche do we really hope to fill? I would hope we fill the niche of a learned body that both practitioners and academics want to be associated with since INFORMS facilitates the exchange of information and discussion on new findings and new applications. We offer opportunities in terms of publishing and public speaking. We stand up for the profession in other circles and serve as an interface with public policy-makers.

How has your OR/MS background helped you throughout your career, and how can INFORMS better project the value of OR/MS to the general public?

My OR/MS background gave me the means to try new and novel approaches to problem-solving. When I was working for the police department, the chief would often say, "Don't just tell me the problem. Tell me how you're going to fix it." For a young person just out of graduate school, that was important. Anyone can find the problems. The hard part is solving the problem. That's one area we have to make sure people understand: Not only do we help people find the nature of the problem, but we can also find alternate solutions and hopefully an optimal solution to fix that problem.

Marketing and public relations are the keys to getting the message out that OR/MS people are doing some important things for the country.

Yes. (Public Relations Director) Barry List, for example, is really beginning to develop a good network and communicating with a large number of outlets — newspapers and magazines, both in the business community as well as in the popular press. He's mining that area. He's been translating some of the papers our members have been writing into something that the popular press can pick up on. For example, what is the best way to find a parking place. That drew attention in the popular press.

Cracking that PR nut is tough. You have to build relationships over time and feed your contacts interesting information. Every now and then you get a hit, and once you get a hit, they'll come back to you. We also need to interface at the public-policy level. When I was with the actuaries, we leveraged a chance phone call into a strong working relationship with the White House in which we were consistently asked to provide information. The key is, you have to extend yourself and make your presence and expertise known.

Describe your managing philosophy or style as it relates to organizations such as INFORMS, and the roles of hired staff and volunteers.

One of the things you learn as a professional association manager is that, to a certain extent, you are viewed as the hired gun to run the business, while the members and the volunteer leaders in particular set the policy. Thanks to my background in OR/MS, I feel a kinship with them and want to help them not only on the business side, but help them set the future of the organization. A lot of my colleagues in the business will sit back and say, "Whatever the board says, I will do." I would like to be a more active participant with the board.

The business is important. INFORMS is a good-size professional and scientific body. We have a multi-million dollar budget; we have 30-plus staff members. We are not small potatoes. This is a business, and first and foremost we have to operate it as a business. That's one of the areas I can do. It is a growing business. We have a significant endowment. We need to manage the investments; we need to make sure we are spending the members' money properly. I like to work closely with the volunteer leaders. It is the members' organization. It is their money, it is their organization. Again I see my job as sort of a stewardship — to provide guidance based on both my background with OR/MS and my 15 years in the association business.

And the volunteers?

The volunteers are critical. Without the members and the volunteers, what good is the organization? We take our lead from the members. We may grow in size in terms of staff, we may grow in size in terms of members. The staff will probably do more as time limits the volunteers' ability to contribute their time to us. But nevertheless, it is the members' organization.

INFORMS exists to help them and the profession, and that's what I'm here for. Our volunteers are so strong and so committed, it's just incredible. I've seen organizations that were strictly staff-driven, where the members said, "Just go do it." This is really a personal membership organization, and that's the way we want to keep it. The staff will be here to help them get to where they want to go.

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