[Campus notwithstanding, I had a certain amount of trepidation. I find most conferences to be at once very inspiring and stimulating, yet also intimidating and discouraging.

"Inspiring and stimulating" because getting smart people together drives conversations that are fundamentally different from what you talk about with the people you see regularly. In addition to hearing about other people's ideas and projects, I also benefit from collecting my own thoughts and addressing fresh questions about my work. I crave this kind of discourse — it is like oxygen — and my flight home is always spent scribbling down thoughts and in envisioning possibilities.

"Intimidating and discouraging," alas, is also part of my experience. Conference sessions are too often just specialists talking to one another. At best, these are vibrant exchanges about fine points, and at worst, they are merely exercises in snobbery (intergroup barriers) and in positioning (intragroup cat fights). Bridge building is often contrived, cursory or absent — so too often the rest of us feel like kids at a candy store with our faces pressed against the window.]

Anyway, this Wharton conference, entitled "The Call Center Forum," was terrific. There were basically three distinct species in attendance, and I learned valuable things from each group. There were organizational behaviorists and industrial/organizational psychologists, examining various aspects of the call center agent experience. They provided me with a sense of how to tackle human subjects data collection, a happy hour promise of useful references from Alicia Grandey and a dinner debate with Anat Rafaeli on the relative importance of selection versus training.

Classical OR people were there too, all of us paddling happily around in the rich pond of mathematical problems associated with the human capital supply chain. Assaf Zeevi and Mike Harrison's paper on fluid models got me thinking once again about the real challenge of simultaneously optimizing routing and staffing decisions. Avi Mandelbaum, as always, amazed me with the breadth and depth of his knowledge in this space.

But it was the industry people who really made my trip. [Note: The names of the industry people have been changed to protect my new friends from any potential issues with employers, employees, competitors, suppliers, and/or customers.] These guys peppered me with questions, told me their remarkable stories and kept me out late at the bar.

"Oscar Garden" is an evangelist. He has a fervent belief that intelligent selection of employees can have a huge impact on the bottom line, and a healthy skepticism about the plethora of assessment software tools being peddled to executives. He shared strange but true horror stories about software models based on data about factory workers then being used to "scientifically" select financial analysts. According to Oscar, such practices are commonplace, which often makes him feel like he's howling at the moon. But he soldiers on as an HR professional, slowly winning hearts and changing minds. We need him out there.

"Manny Charlton" was an even bigger revelation. Manny is the manager of an operations research group in a large American corporation, a species that I had hoped was on its way to extinction. Don't get me wrong: I actually want more OR practiced in the organization, but I have long felt that we "experts" needed to be far closer to the people actually running the business, understanding their conceptual problems, data challenges and also the difficulties of implementing changes while keeping the machine moving day to day.

Manny disagreed, citing his group's freedom to be creative, to go down different paths and to figure out the best way to build forecasts, create schedules, assess operational performance and identify savings opportunities. But his case for why his group can and should exist was based on an impressive string of business successes achieved over the past few years.

As the next round of beers arrived, I kept listening for the "secret sauce," the keys to Manny's success. Here's what I learned:

• Manny's group is small, just three dedicated individuals supporting a business with a half billion dollar budget, and constantly strapped for resources. Nevertheless, Manny wastes almost no time whining about his budget. Instead, the entire team is very creative in making use of available software resources and databases. (It turns out they had bought a copy of Arena Call Center, which I had helped design, so I caught an earful about its shortcomings.)
  
  
• Manny has an intimate understanding of his corporation. Prior to his current position, he was a staff analyst within a marketing group, and he takes every possibility to get himself in contact with different people, shaking hands, connecting names to faces and "listening" for opportunities to deliver value to internal customers.
  
  
• Manny is passionate about OR, both its theory and its application. He shares his data freely with researchers and is constantly searching for new results to apply in his internal practice.
  
  
• Manny's team is hardworking, each of them willing and able to wear multiple hats, and extremely loyal. Key parts of Manny's job: keep them busy, inspired, clear of the corporate noise, serving as their "rainmaker," coach and buffer.

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