A column about nothing yet everything

If you’ve scrolled down this far, congratulations, you’ve reached the Departments, where some of the best writing in Analytics magazine can be found. I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight one of our many talented columnists who has been contributing thought-provoking content every issue for the past decade.

“Analyze This!” author Vijay Mehrotra and I first met more than 20 years ago, when I attended his session presentation at an INFORMS conference and came away quite impressed. I introduced myself afterward and asked him if he would be interested in contributing an article to OR/MS Today, the membership magazine of INFORMS that I also edit. Vijay countered with another idea: How about a column called “Was It Something I Said?”

“What’s it about?” I asked.

If memory serves me correctly, Vijay – then a high-tech Silicon Valley entrepreneur, now a professor at the University of San Francisco’s School of Management – gave me a Seinfeld-esque answer along the lines of: “It’s about my everyday observations as an operations research analyst.”

Hmmm. So, it’s a column about nothing, yet it’s about everything O.R. The year was 1998, and “Seinfeld” was about to wrap up its final season. It worked for NBC, maybe a column about nothing yet everything O.R. would work for OR/MS Today. And thanks to Vijay’s insight on endless topics and his terrific storytelling and writing skills, it worked great.

Over the next 11 years, Vijay did, indeed, write about everything – from his recollections of George Bernard Dantzig upon the great GBD’s passing to his thoughts on Burning Man after a trip to the otherworldly festival in the Nevada desert – all told from his unique O.R. perspective.

In 2009, a year after we launched Analytics magazine, Vijay, seeking a fresh audience, gave his column a new name (“Analyze This!”), tweaked the content to fit the new readership and started writing for Analytics. In this issue’s column, Vijay tackles the topic of healthcare, focusing on the work of Kevin Ross, CEO of Precision Driven Health in New Zealand, whose unique partnership with healthcare providers and universities overcomes inherent obstacles to optimize healthcare.

Noting that an often-quoted study found that the average for translational health research to change common practice is 17 years, Ross tells Vijay: “Health is hard and slow for analytics professionals. This is hard to break, with entrenched ideas of what it takes to change … and who gets to decide.”

Vijay, who in the column recalls his own impatience with and eventual abandonment of a healthcare research project many years ago, vows to have “more reasonable expectations and more persistence” should he have another such opportunity. Given the chance, I’m sure Vijay will make it work, just like his columns.