OR/MS Today - October 1999

October 1999

The Golf Pro's Parable

By Douglas A. Samuelson

The OR/MS analyst swore as his drive once again sliced off to the right. "Tell me," he pleaded to his golf instructor, "am I ever really going to get this right?"

The golf pro smiled. "Well, you are getting better, even if you don't realize it," he reassured the analyst. "Your drives are going about 30 yards farther, and you're hitting more of them straight. Don't get upset if they're not all perfect — nobody's are! Just keep working on it!"

"That's what I tell my students," the analyst responded with a sour half-smile. "And what I've learned, after many years of teaching, is that there are a few who just don't get it. No matter what I or anyone else does, they really don't get it. And worse yet, they are usually the last ones to realize they're having trouble! I don't want to be like that!"

"I'm not sure what you mean," the golf pro said. "Most people who take lessons with me get some improvement, at least. Why don't your students?"

"I'd say most of my students learn something, too," the analyst replied, "but some don't pick up enough, quickly enough. If I only improve my golf swing a little, but I'm happy with that, it's fine for both of us. If my students only learn a little, they fail. They're working toward a standard."

"I see," the pro conceded. "I guess it's like something I do see in my lessons, too. Some people have old habits, or maybe even physical weaknesses, that they just can't break free of. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes," the analyst affirmed. "Take this one class I gave last spring, where the students had to do a little market analysis and forecasting project. Part of the assignment was to tell me what they would do if, six months later, the actual business volume was half what they had predicted.

"Of course," he went on, "what I wanted them to tell me was which of their assumptions they would go back and check. A few of them, though, just couldn't grasp the idea that a bad forecast meant they had missed something! They tried to blame the business' marketing, the service, even the weather! I can just imagine how a real client would react to that!"

They shared a laugh. "Still," the golf pro pointed out, "some managers get by pretty well doing just what you described."

"Do they ever!" the analyst groaned. "And especially in this town, where one out of three people you meet is like the rooster who thought the sun wouldn't come up if he didn't get out there and crow. I've met people in regulatory agencies who sincerely believed the industry they regulated couldn't possibly function without them. They would just get insulted if you told them what industry people thought of that."

"Yeah, I've met a few of those folks myself," the golf pro chuckled. "Some of them really do think the little part of the world they know well is the only part that matters." "Come to think of it, I've seen it in a small-town university, too," the analyst reflected. "I taught there for a few years several years ago. The place had a terribly stiff and complicated procurement process, and we all complained about it. I knew of at least one major sponsor, an elevator manufacturer, who ended up pulling out a lot of their support because of it. This manufacturer had installed a lot of the elevators on campus, and it seemed they couldn't win the contracts to maintain them. Somebody would always come in with a low-ball bid and beat them, and the procurement people thought it would look like favoritism if they wrote in more requirements about demonstrated experience with maintaining this type of elevators — so the high-quality bidder could never win. The elevators worked so badly that this manufacturer was embarrassed to have its name on them! And the procurement people wouldn't budge.

"One time," he continued, "I was trying to move a computer purchase along a little faster, because we were getting worried about meeting our first deadline with a sponsor. And this procurement guy gazed at me sternly and said, 'You professors don't appreciate how important we are. You get your grants because of us! Sponsors care about how honest our procurements are, and that's why you win.' Now, what could I do to explain the facts of life to that guy?"

"Not much," the golf pro laughed.

"But some 'techies' I know are just as bad," the analyst sighed ruefully. "I saw a request for bids on a forecasting project a few weeks ago, where some high-powered information systems analyst had written the specifications. There was all sorts of stuff about how fast screens had to refresh, how robust the system had to be against entry errors, how much on-line help it had to provide, how efficiently it had to use computer resources, and on and on. The one criterion he didn't put in was how accurate the forecasts were! How's that for getting lost in the technical details and forgetting the purpose of the effort?"

The golf pro just laughed some more.

"And then there are my very own colleagues," the analyst concluded, shaking his head. "Lately I've been writing a lot about seeing problems from management's point of view. A couple of pretty good friends of mine told me recently that I should stop writing 'just good stories' and focus more on showing our profession's problem-solving ability, so more readers might want to hire us to do projects for them.

"Now," he added, "how do I explain to them that that's exactly what I think I was doing?"

Douglas A. Samuelson is the president of Infologix and Division E director of INFORMS.

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