My wife says I am a porn star — I couldn't make it to the "Hollywood" of (pure) mathematics, so I am in the video-land of O.R. instead. Do I have a branding problem or what?

Two things from the December 2005 issue of OR/MS Today caught my eye. The first was the lament by my fellow columnist Doug Samuelson [1] that many O.R. people (academics?) working on bioterrorism haven't got "even the first few pieces of subject matter knowledge." The second was INFORMS President-Elect Mark Daskin's comment that there is a "healthy amount of respect between academics and practitioners" [2].

Really? In my first academic job interview many years ago before I went to industry, a senior O.R. academic pooh-poohed my publications being in Interfaces despite a chief editor of Interfaces having been from the same department. And as an academic now, even in Europe where practice and academia are closer than in the United States, I find that practitioners always slip in a snide remark about the "real world" despite my industry experience.

I don't know how successful the "Science of Better" campaign has been. I never saw anything in London other than the occasional picture in OR/MS Today of people wearing baseball caps with the "Science of Better" logo. I have visited the Web site and have filled out survey forms with promises to help, but I did not get any requests. I have been interviewed by the BBC, CNBC, SkyNews and others, but never through INFORMS. Maybe the Science of Better campaign is as international as the World Series. That would explain the baseball caps.

Having a clear target audience helps. For the most part, academics target only other academics for the bulk of their efforts pertaining to publication. Sometimes you and your cronies re-label yourself as "supply chain" experts when all you have been doing is job shop scheduling or queueing all of your life, but that is still within the club. The benefit of in-breeding is that we academics continually refine knowledge, although after a few generations we get three-eyed research output.

Practitioners, on the other hand, target their bosses and deadlines. The emphasis is on what is done (and how to keep the boss happy) rather than what is said or written. This does not justify practitioners being holier than thou, but it does make them disrespectful of O.R. academics (but curiously not finance ones!).

There is also the pre-tenure and post-tenure split for target audience among academics. At an INFORMS conference some years ago, a recently tenured "supply chain" professor who had done some work with a startup — his first "real-life" experience — mocked other academics for their lack of practical knowledge. He did not discuss his own pre-tenure work when he was just "playing the tenure game" of publishing in the flagship INFORMS journals.

But academia and practice can meet. In Finland, business schools and technical schools work very closely with industry. And, having seen a paper plant that used ozone for bleaching and produced oxygen as a by-product, I can say that this is not the only way that the Finns make the world a better place than how they find it.

A Big Umbrella


O.R.'s big umbrella creates problems for branding. Dantzig said that the definition of O.R. depends on who you ask: "This includes the people who are inclined to be mathematicians who are trying to solve these abstract problems all the way down to people who have the real problem and have to get an answer to the boss" [3]. The hardest problem in industry (or even academia) is managing change and complexity — see the excellent article by Nazareth [3]. It's just that academics went in the direction of simplifying everything to mathematics, and practitioners went in the other direction because they had to tackle this complexity and adopt whichever discipline the problem lay in.

In academia, many have relabeled themselves "operations management" experts to keep their jobs in the business school. (I, too, call myself an OM expert, but that follows from a decade of consulting, and in U.K. business schools, O.R. is not a dirty word.) There are fields now called "soft O.R." and "systems science" dealing with the complexity of real situations. Then there is "hard" O.R. We use terms such as "applications of O.R.," but isn't all O.R. applied? Or we use terms such as "math of O.R.," but in academia isn't that all there is to it anyway?

I doubt that the Finnish tenure or promotion system is contingent on publications in the flagship INFORMS journals. Other countries can close the gap between practice and academia by giving more importance to journals such as JORS in the U.K., Interfaces in the United States and similarly motivated journals in their own countries than to the flagship INFORMS journals. I hope to do that for my junior colleagues as regards their promotion.

After 10 years in industry and then three years in academia, I have finally made it to full professor. What should I do next? Maybe I should go back to Dallas-based Sabre where the O.R. problems are challenging and real. How does "DoctOR Does Dallas" sound as an O.R. video title?



Mohan Sodhi heads the operations management and quantitative methods faculty at Cass Business School in London. He welcomes your comments at M.Sodhi@city.ac.uk.

References

1. Samuelson, D., 2005, "The Nurse's Parable," OR/MS Today, December, Vol. 32, No. 6, pg. 80.
   
   
2. Horner, P., 2005, "Q&A: A Passion for Publications," OR/MS Today, December, Vol. 32, No. 6, pgs. 22-28.
   
   
3. Nazareth, J.L., 2005, "The Art and Science of Better," OR/MS Today, December, Vol. 32, No. 32, pgs. 30-34.

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