Richard C. Larson often describes operations research as both the "world's greatest profession" and the "world's most important hidden profession." As a recognized world leader on both the academic and practice sides of the O.R. fence, Larson takes great pride in the first part of the description and, like many of his colleagues in INFORMS, is determined to do something to change the second.

The Mitsui Professor of Engineering Systems and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT and a former director of MIT's famed Operations Research Center, Larson's unabashed passion for his chosen profession prompted the INFORMS nominating committee to ask him to run for the organization's highest office two years ago. After winning the election, Larson served this past year as president-elect. He'll assume the presidency on Jan. 1, 2005.

Larson, who literally wrote the book on urban O.R. ("Urban Operations Research," 1981, co-authored with Amedeo Odoni, and "Urban Police Patrol Analysis," which won the 1972 Lanchester Prize from ORSA), recently returned to his urban service systems roots. Much of his current research focuses on emergency response planning, research that is supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (see "Emergency Response: O.R. Models for Homeland Security" in the October 2004 issue of OR/MS Today).

This past year, when he wasn't working on ways to aid emergency first responders here at home or overseeing LINC (Learning International Networks Consortium, http://linc.mit.edu), an MIT-based international e-learning project that he founded, Larson was carrying the O.R. banner around the world. As an invited guest speaker, he spoke at conferences, symposiums and workshops from China to Iran and many places in between. Larson returned to the United States just in time to attend the national INFORMS conference in Denver in late October where OR/MS Today editor Peter Horner caught up with him for the following interview.

You've received just about every honor and award INFORMS has to offer. You've served on countless committees and served as president of ORSA. You're widely respected in both the academic and practice worlds of operations research. Why run for president of INFORMS at this stage of your career?

Members of the nominating committee called to see if I was interested, and I said, "Why me?" I told them there were many talented folks out there — many of them younger than me — who would be excellent and who needed the experience, so why are you calling me? And they said, "Well, you make operations research sound like fun, and you also know how to explain it so that it shows its practical nature. It contributes to theory and modeling and methodology, but it's also rooted in practice, and we think those are attributes we would like to have in a president." That kind of got to me. I was flattered and honored and said, "OK, I'll run again." It wasn't something that I sought, but when they said that, they had me hooked.

So you answered a call to duty.

You could say that, but O.R. really is fun for me and still is to this day. I'm embarrassed to be paid for it because it is so much fun. I call it the world's most important hidden profession. One of my career goals in life has been to get the word out, and that's very compatible with many of the initiatives that are going on now in INFORMS.

Give us a Reader's Digest version of the state of the profession from your vantage point.

The state of the profession in terms of our methodology development, books and world-class journals has never been better. The state of the profession in terms of its general awareness by others in certain companies and government agencies is excellent, as indicated by the Edelman Prize competition and other things, but a lot more can be done there. If you go to a random reception — what used to be called a cocktail party — and talk to a stranger, and they ask what you do, and you tell them operations research, at least nine times out of 10 in my experience they don't know what you're talking about. That's something that we are working on improving. Getting the word out is important because we can really do a lot for so many companies and organizations, yet there's still a minority who really understand and see the value added there.

What about the state of O.R. education?

Again, in many senses we're stronger than we've ever been in terms of the methodology and theorems and proofs and textbooks and journal articles we've been developing since the 1950s, but in one sense we're weaker. I think our operations research curricula tend to overemphasize the techniques and tools of optimization, stochastic processes and all the mathematical, technical things to the exclusion of the modeling, to the exclusion of common sense, to the exclusion of framing the problem and formulating with basic principles. That's what I believe we have to bring back and emphasize in our teaching.

Old-school O.R.?

Ironically, the strength and depth of our mathematical technologies has squeezed out the common-sense approach to problems and turned what was once O.R.'s greatest strength into what is widely perceived by those outside of the profession as a weakness or soft spot. I personally think that 70 percent of the value added of operations research is the correct framing and formulation of the problem. The manipulation of equations to get an optimal or better solution is a relatively minor step after you've done the major steps of framing and formulation. Somehow much of our curriculum has forgotten that, and a negative consequence of that is that O.R. has been trivialized, by those who choose not to utilize its services, as a branch of applied mathematics whose people don't really understand the intricacies and realities of real life and real-life applications. I think that's a mistake, and somehow these issues have to be brought back into how we train and educate our students.

If O.R., practiced correctly, is so valuable in the real world, why isn't the real world beating a path to O.R.'s door? Every company is looking for a competitive advantage. Revenue management, for example...

Revenue management is a child of O.R. O.R. created revenue management.

Yes, but there's a disconnect between the O.R. profession and the tool or methodology called "revenue management" out in the real world.

You're right. It gets a marketing label with a separate name like "revenue management." "Supply chain management" is another example. People forget or never knew that this is really O.R., that operations research gave birth to this.

Who or what is responsible for this disconnect?

I don't know of any individual or process that's responsible. Al Blumstein used to say that the role of O.R. is to have sand come up out of the desert and form weird things at first and all of a sudden you have a beautiful pyramid, but by the time it becomes a pyramid, it's labeled something other than O.R. So O.R. is the process of creating subfields out of something that was totally unstructured before, and once a beautiful pyramid forms, people forget that it was O.R. that created it. It's re-labeled something like "revenue management" or "supply chain management."

It's a 50-year-old curse.

Operations research gives birth to lots of children who forget their last names; they forget who their mother and father are. You're right; it is a curse. It's very frustrating.

Give us your take on the state of INFORMS.

INFORMS, in many ways, is in great shape. Financially, it's never been better, and a lot of credit goes to the recent boards and to the entire professional staff at INFORMS headquarters. The organization is run very professionally now, and I'm almost in awe of how that whole system is set up and going. Hopefully, during my administration, the financial part is something I won't have to worry about. That's not to say that on a cash-flow basis we have a lot a leeway. We want to make sure the cash flow is neutral or slightly positive or slightly negative. We don't want to go into debt again. There were times in the past when the financial part was in desperate trouble. We're not going to revisit those days.

In terms of attendance at our fall national meetings, we're at an all-time high, it's on an upward trend, and we're maxing out on capacity at these hotels. That's a good problem to have.

What about the INFORMS membership numbers?

The overall INFORMS membership is on a slight down trend. That's a worry, and that's the focus of my Strategic Planning Committee. We really need to increase INFORMS membership, particularly those who are tied to industry, practice and government, many of whom do not have Ph.D.s. At the moment, about 75 percent of the members of INFORMS have Ph.D.s. I'd like to get it closer to 50-50, not by asking Ph.D.s who are currently members of INFORMS to leave, but by finding new people without Ph.D.s to join. We graduate so many more master's-degree O.R. people than Ph.D.s, and yet only 25 percent of our members are master's-level people. Where do they all go? Why don't they join INFORMS?

That's my key priority right now — the Strategic Planning Committee, which I started this year. I plan to stay on top of that for the three years that I'm on the board. Once it's implemented, it should be a perpetual process. We're trying to find out what new products and services, if any, we need to add to the INFORMS portfolio that master's-level or even bachelor's-level graduates will find attractive enough to join INFORMS.

In your presidential position statement, you suggested that INFORMS could potentially nearly double its membership by reaching out to non-Ph.D. graduates. Is that reasonable?

It's not just about growing the numbers. That's secondary. Depending on whom you talk to, the membership is either 10,000 or 12,000 now. The goal is not just to go to from, say, 12,000 to 15,000 or eventually to 20,000, although that would certainly be nice. I think the key here is the profession would be stronger if we had 50 percent or more of our members who were tied to industry, who work for the government, who work in practice, because those people would come to our meetings and communicate with us and tell us their pressing problems that require some O.R. assistance; problems that, if solved, would be implemented immediately.

Does a membership top-heavy with Ph.D.s contribute to the disconnect with the real world we talked about earlier?

I think that's the part of it. Yes, there are many INFORMS members, including many professors, who have an active consulting practice and work with the real world. I think that's great, but with 75 percent Ph.D.s, many of our assistant professors and associate professors, particularly the younger ones, struggle to get any ties to real practice. And so they're working on invented problems, problems they invent at the blackboard that may or may not bear any resemblance to reality. I'd much rather have these great brains of our professors and students working on real problems and that have implementation impact.

Is there an invisible wall dividing the O.R. community into two distinct camps, academics and practitioners?

Those who partition their thinking into practitioner and theoretician or practitioner and methodologist I think are wrong. The fathers and mothers of our profession way back when were both. Look at Philip M. Morse. He called operations research an empirical science. He brought the paradigm of physicists who are both experimentalists and theoreticians, and he'd go out and observe and collect data and interview people and come back and try to create models. It was an iterative process — he'd check and check until he had it right. I think if we had more ties with industry and government through master's- or bachelor's-level people who work at these organizations, we as university professors and students will be working on real, cutting-edge problems that, when implemented, would have a substantial impact on elevating the prestige and visibility of our profession. My contention is that the best theory comes from the best practice, and that you can't separate them.

So rather than just growing numbers, the appeal to master's-degree students is to address the "blind spot" in the profession you described in your position statement?

Yes. If we're successful in this campaign — this is generational, we're not going to have 5,000 more members tomorrow — but suppose five to 10 years from now that we do. And these new members are non-Ph.D. folks. That's nice for the profession. We're going to have more people at our meetings, especially our spring practice meeting. More importantly, though, those people help close that loop between theory and practice and make it an integrated system. They would come to our meetings, and they would write articles for Interfaces and OR/MS Today that would indicate, for example, the 10 most pressing problems we need you guys on the campuses and your students to work on that would increase our bottom line by 30 percent or whatever.

In focusing on growing INFORMS membership through non-Ph.D.s, aren't you threatening to dilute the priesthood?

If you keep the priesthood pure, pretty soon there's no one left to preach to on Sundays because the people in the parish decide not to come; they find the message irrelevant.

In terms of membership, is INFORMS sustainable at the status quo?

INFORMS is sustainable at this level. The attendance at our fall national meetings has never been stronger. The financials have never been stronger. For a relatively small society, our journals have worldwide respect. These are things we are very proud of.

So INFORMS is doing well.

INFORMS is doing great. I'm thankful that INFORMS is doing so well that I can focus on other things like growing the membership through non-Ph.D.s. It's nice not to have to focus on some financial crisis, and that's because the leadership in the last decade has really put the financials in good shape.

Any other big problems or concerns with INFORMS that you believe have to be addressed?

At the operational level going forward, clearly in the next few years we're going to have to confront the issue of open access for publications, which is a trend that is slowly building. More than half of our revenue comes from journal subscriptions. That is an issue that the new president-elect, Mark Daskin, has taken up very correctly and wisely as the focus of his Strategic Planning Committee. So we're going to create through his committee a multi-year plan for how to address these myriad issues dealing with Internet-based access to publications.

We're the tail on the donkey here, because whatever happens is going to be guided by what happens to big organizations like IEEE and maybe even congressional laws and those sorts of things. INFORMS is not going to have a great impact on what is becoming a major national trend. But we have to have a set of policies and procedures in place and strategies to change as the times change and yet assure the financial viability and strength of INFORMS.

What is your assessment of the "Science of Better" campaign after one year, and what, if anything, do you plan to do differently?

I support the Science of Better campaign. Whenever you get into something like this, you have to think in terms of a multi-year investment. I think the first year went as well as could be expected. The promotional material that came out, the radio interviews, the press coverage, the articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe — all of these things were great. I have urged and Tom [Tom Cook, president of INFORMS in 2003 who championed the marketing initiative] has agreed that starting this year, we're going to add a new dimension to the approach. We are going to split the vice president of Outreach Education into two vice presidents, assuming the board goes through with the vote in January. That will mean a separate V.P of Education and a separate V.P. of Marketing and Outreach. That new person won't come on board until Jan. 1, 2006, so during my presidential year, I'll be the "Tom Cook" of this marketing effort on the board and the executive committee.

You'll be the INFORMS point man for the "Science of Better" marketing campaign?

Yes. Part of my willingness to do this — in addition to the fact that Tom and his very energetic committee will continue to play a very big role — is the opportunity to integrate it with the membership campaign that my Strategic Planning Committee has been working on. If you think about the Science of Better campaign, it's a top-down approach. It's aimed at CEOs, CIOs, managers of large sub-groups and their organizations to make them aware of O.R., and I think that's fine.

But you can also have a bottom-up approach. That is, if we can get the people with master's degrees in O.R. to become involved and active in INFORMS, and give them the information about the Science of Better, they can bubble this stuff up through their chain of command. That way we have both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. Tom has agreed to add this dimension to it, and as a result, I have agreed to serve as the titular head of the Science of Better campaign next year.

In your heart of hearts, do you think INFORMS can win the war on marketing?

I think we can. I think it requires a multi-dimensional and sophisticated approach, the exact dimensions of which we don't exactly realize yet. Publications are an example. I think OR/MS Today can be part of that solution, and getting it distributed to key people who are not INFORMS members could very well be one of the visible outcomes of this. Another visible outcome might be the creation of another publication vehicle somewhere between OR/MS Today and Interfaces — something along the lines of the IEEE's Spectrum or the Statistical Society's Chance. These are magazines that have intellectual content, but are written at the level of, say, Scientific American, and they are popular beyond the society's membership. My Strategic Planning Committee will design a market analysis questionnaire to see if a publication along those lines might be feasible and welcomed.

I think, then, that winning the marketing issue is a multi-dimensional one that will involve publications, perhaps new ones, perhaps distributing things like OR/MS Today to a broader audience, as well as the kind of things we've been doing recently. I don't think, however, that we're going to continue spending $300,000 or $400,000 a year forever on marketing. So somehow I'm hoping that when this calms down and our expenditure is reduced in this area, it will be the Wall Street Journal that calls us and the New York Times that calls us rather than us using intermediaries to have them agree to do a feature on operations research.

At what point does INFORMS declare victory and stop spending $300,000 or more a year on marketing?

You declare victory when you go to a cocktail party and somebody asks you what you do for a living and more than half the people in the room understand what you're talking about.

How far out is that day?

I think it's generational; I think it's 10 to 20 years.

That's a long battle.

Well, look, the society just had its 50th birthday. It remains the world's most important hidden profession, so you have to have a sort of Asian attitude, where a thousand years is not that long a time. I'm talking about five to 10 years. Even if it's 20 years, we're only talking about 40 percent of the society's previous history, which isn't that long.

When it was introduced, the Science of Better campaign envisioned enlisting hundreds if not thousands of INFORMS members as foot soldiers in the marketing war, yet only a relative small number have reportedly signed up for active duty. What's going on?

I have to talk to Irv [Irv Lustig, a leader in the effort to mobilize the INFORMS troops in support of the Science of Better campaign and a recent candidate for president-elect of INFORMS] about that. By the way, Irv's agreement to keep his same level of energy on this going into next year was part of my willingness to say yes to the titular head of the Better campaign. I think we have to really study what the model was in Year One, and be prepared to make some adjustments. Also, the plan several months ago was to feature the Edelman Prize — the lowest-hanging fruit, our organization's biggest asset, yet one that is relatively invisible to the outside world — in Year Two. One could envision a black-tie affair where the Edelman Prize presentation becomes a national event with press coverage, something like the Baldrige Award.

The Science of Better Planning Committee has now backed off of that, at least for 2005. I'm concerned about that. As titular head, I want to put that back on the front burner because I think the Edelman competition is the most important asset we have as an organization for reaching out to companies and governments and showing the impact of O.R. It's just a wonderful thing. I believe it should be obligatory for students to have exposure to the Edelman competition.

Why did INFORMS back off showcasing the Edelman in 2005?

I think the board thought the timing was not right. The thinking was, if you have this big black-tie affair, you need a conference sponsor, a foundation sponsor, a corporate sponsor to underwrite it, and it might take a year or two to put this in place. I still think that that should be the No. 1 priority for the second year of the Science of Better campaign, so I'm going to push it.

What's your vision for the future of O.R.?

If you think about it, science has been artificially partitioned into physics and chemistry and biology. Mathematics is a part of science. Engineering, too. If you look back in history, say from the first industrial revolution on, as soon as we figure out how we can conquer certain laws of physics, we invent things to design and create systems. So civil engineering was the first engineering discipline at universities, because we figured out how to use physics to design bridges and build roads. Electrical engineering was born around the turn of the century because we figured out how to apply the equations of electricity and electromagnetism to actually design and create electrical circuits.

That's a strength up to a point, but engineering disciplines — civil engineering, mechanical engineering, materials science, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, computer science, nuclear engineering, aeronautics and astronautics — those were all born at the time when we could conquer those physical laws in order to design and build things. That turned out to be both a strength and a weakness, because we ended up with a number of partitions that divided us in terms of engineering.

Operations research cuts across horizontally here, so we're not constrained into some silo of a traditional engineering situation. We're only constrained into a silo of the scientific method. Phil Morse basically said operations research is the application of a scientific method to operational problems of systems. We need to be elevated to the level at least of all those different disciplines and say, "Hey, if you have operational problems that combine all these other things, call an operations researcher." They are the ones who can solve these problems; they're the Blues Brothers that come in and solve your problem. So somehow we need to be viewed as the generic scientific and engineering problem-solvers for complex problems that don't fit into natural silos. Is it going to happen in five years? No. Is it going to happen in 10 years? Maybe. Twenty years? I hope so.

A year from now, how are you going to measure the success of your presidency of INFORMS?

Well, you want to do everything, but if you try to do everything, you don't do anything well. My major initiative is to beef up the faction of our membership that is non-Ph.D.s. We won't know the outcome of that for at least five years. I'm going to be on this for three years on the board, just like Tom Cook kept on his marketing case all three years he was on the board. So even though I have all these other objectives — some of them philosophical and paradigm-oriented and very important to me — I have to keep my eye focused like a laser on membership growth, in particular non-Ph.D.s. So that will be my most important performance measure a year from now, five years from now and 10 years from now.

Any last thoughts for the INFORMS membership?

You belong to a great profession. I can't think of any better profession. One of the neatest things about O.R. is being able to frame and formulate and solve problems. You can be an expert and contribute in almost any industrial, service or governmental application, because O.R. people are a quick study. They can structure the generic aspect of a problem and make it familiar with other things they've seen to provide return on investment very early on for executives and government organizations. And it's never boring because one day you could be working with an airline, the next day you could be working at a bank, and the next day you could be working at a social welfare office, and yet contributing value in all of those situations. I can't think of a profession that allows that mobility across all those different domains. That's what keeps me energized.

Clarification February, 2005: In an interview that appeared in the December 2004 issue of OR/MS Today, INFORMS President Dick Larson discussed the public relations side of the "Science of Better" campaign and listed, among others, a story about O.R. that appeared in the Boston Globe. INFORMS thanks Mark Eisner of Cornell University for urging reporter Virginia Postrel to write the article. INFORMS Marketing and Public Relations Director Barry List also extends thanks to INFORMS members Mary Crissey and James Pierce for bylining articles that appeared in Computerworld Online, the Birmingham Business Journal and other publications. All have helped make operations research appreciated among a wider audience. — Barry List

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