OR/MS Today - August 2002 - Was It Something I Said?

<BODY bgcolor="#ffffff" link="cc0000" vlink="cc0000" text="#000000"> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br>   <table border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width=480><tr valign=top> <td width=10><img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 hspace=4 border=0></td> <td width=470> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><B><I><A HREF="../../ORMS.shtml" TARGET="_top">OR/MS Today</A> - August 2002</I></B></font><BR> <hr size="1"> <img src="cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <font face="times new roman, times"> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><B>Was It Something I Said?</B></FONT><br> <IMG SRC="../barbluehook.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="4"><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <FONT SIZE="+2"><B>Memo to MBA Instructors:<BR> I Need Your Help</B></FONT><BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><B>By Vijay Mehrotra</B></FONT><br> <hr size="1"> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=12 border=0><br>    By the time you read this, my 20th year high school reunion will have come and gone. I grew up in Duluth, Minn., 2,000 miles from my current home in San Francisco. The cold, snow and ice of those long northern Minnesota winters were never for me.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> Thus, from a very young age, I was hungry to leave, to go somewhere that was warmer and bigger (and more diverse). Eventually, thanks to a graduate fellowship, I did in fact make it to sunny California. Once here, I never left. Don't get me wrong: I have not cut off all contact with my hometown. In the years since I moved away, I have attended a few weddings and shared a few beers and told a few stories with old friends from Central High. I return a few times each year to visit my parents and will on occasion look up an old friend while I'm in town.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> These interactions, however, have grown less and less frequent with each passing year, and it seems fair to say that (with one notable exception  another wayward classmate who wandered out to San Francisco during the dot.com boom) not one member of my high school class has any real sense of my current life. Meanwhile, from my comfortable distance, their lives back in Minnesota seem so calm and orderly. They have jobs with titles that you can understand: Gary is a doctor. Mark is an accountant. Todd is a salesman. Chuck is a safety inspector. Carl runs a construction company. They have wives, families, houses.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> As for me, it's all a bit harder to explain. I am imagining some awfully odd conversations during this reunion.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Classmate 1:</I></B> "How are you doing? What are you up to these days?"<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Me:</I></B> "Well, you know  I still live out in California. I work at a software company now."<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Classmate 1:</I></B> "Software? What kind of stuff does it do? Who uses it?"<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Classmate 2:</I></B> "Do you write programs now, or what?"<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Me:</I></B> "Well, the software deals with things like queues and schedules and tries to optimize things. The people who use it specialize in resource management, especially for call centers."<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Me:</I></B> I'm not really a programmer any more. I mean, I know how to program, but I don't actually write any of the code myself at this company."<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Classmate 1:</I></B> "Hell, I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds pretty damn complicated to me."<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Classmate 2:</I></B> "I don't get it. You work at a software company but you don't actually do any programming. You must have a really cush job, ol' buddy."<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Me:</I></B> "Can I buy you guys a drink?"<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> Such reunions often serve as landmarks in the journey of life, milestones that cause you to wonder about who you are, where you have been, where are you going. As I think about this upcoming reunion, I have had a chance to reflect on some of my choices.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> I chose operations research. I chose to stay in Silicon Valley after finishing school. I chose to work for a software company that is focused on optimization. And like every other software company out there, we are living in a very challenging economic climate.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> A huge challenge is in getting executives  who approve the purchases and sign the checks  to understand the business value of optimization. In many ways, this is not too much different than getting my old pals at the reunion to understand what it is that I do for a living. I have learned from experience that execs' attention spans are not much longer and their appreciation for mathematical concepts is not much greater than that of many of my high school classmates. Having recently taken on a senior management position myself, I have an actual appreciation for the chaos-induced pressures that our typical target decision-maker is under.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> Message to all of you who teach in business schools out there, educating the tens of thousands of MBAs we produce each year: I need your help. Like me, most of your were trained on the mathematical concepts around mathematical models. But I need you to convey some things that are quite different than that:<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Success Stories.</I></B> We have a lot of them now. I am increasingly inspired by what I hear through <I>Interfaces,</I> through this magazine and through the grapevine about the impact that OR can have. I need your graduates to understand <I>through many, many specific examples</I> that operations research can have a huge financial and/or customer satisfaction impact on almost any business out there. If forced to choose, I'd rather have them understand "What" than "How."<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Case Studies.</I></B> Nearly all successful applications are more organizationally complex than mathematically complex. Managers, IT departments, users, vendors, third parties  a lot of moving parts to actually embed new solutions into the way business is conducted. I need your graduates to understand how to get people to work together toward a common goal. How about joint cases with colleagues from organizational behavior?<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> <B><I>Passion for Results.</I></B> If you are teaching MBA students, you are in most cases the first operations research professional that any of them have ever encountered. I need you to show them that you are excited by the promise of modeling to make a material impact on how business is managed. To some extent, they will prejudge me based on how they responded to you.<BR> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=6 border=0><br> Enough for now. I'm off to the reunion.<br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <IMG SRC="../barbluehook.gif" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="4"><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=2 border=0><br> <FONT face="verdana, arial, helvetica" SIZE=2><I>Vijay Mehrotra is vice president of the Solutions Group at Blue Pumpkin Software. He can be reached by e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:Vijay@BluePumpkin.com">Vijay@BluePumpkin.com</A>.</I><BR>  <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=5 border=0><br>  <img src="../barblue.gif" width=468 height=1 border=0 alt=" "><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <font face="verdana, arial, helvetica" size="1"> <CENTER><script type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script></CENTER><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <LI> <A HREF="tocfr.html" Target="_top"><I>Table of Contents</I></A><br> <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=4 border=0><br> <LI> <A HREF="../../ORMS.shtml" TARGET="_top"><I>OR/MS Today</I> Home Page</A><br>  <img src="../cleardot.gif" width=1 height=1 vspace=8 border=0><br> <img src="../barblue.gif" width=468 height=1 border=0 alt=" "><br> <b><i>OR/MS Today</i></b> copyright © 2002 by <A HREF="http://www.informs.org/" target="_new">the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences</a>. 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