Merger mania and family ties

In 1990, when I became editor of OR/MS Today, the winds of merger between ORSA and TIMS were more like a whisper. Mum was the word when it came to merger. You rarely heard the M-word in polite OR/MS society because some members of ORSA and TIMS, particularly the former, were concerned that merger would dilute and thus diminish their professional brand and identity. Meanwhile, some staff members in the ORSA and TIMS offices in Baltimore and Providence, R.I., respectively, were concerned the merger might cost them their job. All of which helps explain why the joint ORSA/TIMS committee charged with exploring merger options was discreetly named the benign “Committee on Cooperation.” Who can argue with that?

At the time, ORSA and TIMS already shared many activities, including joint meetings, joint journals and, of course, joint committees. You can never have enough committees, right? As a newcomer to the party, I thought a merger made a lot of sense, but what did I know? Nothing, it turns out. The first of many mistakes I’ve made as editor was a headline for an upcoming joint annual meeting. The headline read “ORSA/TIMS Joint National Meeting” when it was supposed to be “TIMS/ORSA Joint National Meeting.” The two societies rotated who was listed first – TIMS for the spring meeting, ORSA for the fall meeting. I didn’t get the memo, but I heard it loud and clear on the phone from one of the executive directors the minute the issue hit the streets.

Different strokes, different folks, different headquarters, different cultures. Merging ORSA and TIMS (the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences for those relatively new to INFORMS) was going to be, how do we put this, complicated. I had a front-row seat for it all as OR/MS Today emerged as a primary vehicle for ORSA and TIMS leaders and members to share their opinions, and boy, did they.

By 1993, the word “merger” was no longer mum; instead it was prominent in countless headlines in OR/MS Today as the debate heated up in advance of a 1994 merger vote by the membership of both organizations. In one issue alone – April 1994 – we ran 20 pages of merger-related content, including feature stories, op-eds and letters to the editor.

Because this year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of INFORMS, we made plans to put together a feature story for this issue recalling the events leading up to and following the merger of ORSA and TIMS that created it. In researching the story, I was looking forward to going through those old issues of OR/MS Today that documented the whole thing. There was just one problem: I couldn’t find them.

Lionheart Publishing, which published OR/MS Today for 30 years, ceased to exist and closed its office three years ago. Lionheart kept a complete “morgue” of past print copies, but those ended up in the recycle bin before I could get my hands on them. Digitizing OR/MS Today didn’t begin until 1995, and then only a few articles were put online, none of which had to do with the merger. I contacted INFORMS headquarters, which maintained its own collection of past issues of OR/MS Today, but the copies from the critical years of 1993 and 1994 had mysteriously disappeared. That’s when I remembered I had taken issues of OR/MS Today home from the Lionheart office in those early days, before I began telecommuting. But where were they? More than 25 years had come and gone since I last saw them.

That weekend, I began a home search. In the darkest, most remote corner of the basement – a place where only Hans, our occasional visiting opossum, had dared to venture in the last quarter century – I found them in a box hidden behind a pile of old furniture, Christmas decorations and a dusty NordicTrack. Hans had apparently nibbled on the edges, but the copies were otherwise in good shape. Now I could complete the article with real-time quotes and comments by many of the leaders of ORSA and TIMS as they made the case for merger, as well as the loyal opposition who stood up for their ancestral home in operations research. For the rest of the story, “Merger Memories: INFORMS Turns 25,” click here. 

All in the Family

While I was putting together the merger article, Assistant Editor Kara Tucker was writing a series of profiles for this month’s cover story, “Like Father, Like Son and Daughter.” Together, the profiles paint a picture of nine INFORMS members whose children followed them into the “family business” of operations research (broadly defined).

The idea for the feature began almost a year ago when Erick Wikum, then the president of the Analytics Society of INFORMS, mentioned in one of his columns for the Analytics newsletter that has son, Anders, was pursuing a career in O.R. That got us to thinking: How many other “O.R. legacies” are out there and wouldn’t it be fun to hear more about the family dynamic behind them? Did the parent pressure, encourage, discourage or simply remain neutral regarding the offspring’s career choice? Inquiring minds want to know.

With the help of Erick and Jim Cochran (chair of the Magazine Editorial Advisory Board), we quickly compiled a list of about three dozen candidates. Not surprisingly, almost all of them were father-son legacies. We did receive a couple of father-daughter nominees, one father-son-daughter family and one father-mother-son trilogy, all of which immediately went to the top of the list. We did not receive any mother-son or mother-daughter pairings, although that will certainly change with the next generation of operations researchers and analytics analysts.

Kara, who authored the wonderful “Women of O.R.” piece in the February 2019 issue of OR/MS Today, took it from there and created another masterpiece, a must-see mosaic of O.R. legacies.