Engineered

From Lehigh: Ben Mumma's startup WeAchieve

One of the few good things I have to say about LinkedIn (perhaps the only good thing, in fact) is that it allows me to keep track of what my former students are up to. If you're an educator, you know one of the rewards of the job is to see your former students go on and do great things, and over the years I've noticed some of my Lehigh students, especially graduates of the flagship, four-year Integrated Business and Engineering honors program, have been inclined to launch startups and try out the entrepreneurial route. I'll share more of my thoughts on that in another post (it is noteworthy that some American graduates feel they can't fully express their talents except if they become entrepreneurs) but for now I wanted to give a shoutout to Ben Mumma's startup WeAchieve. It's still January so most of my readers will still have their New Year resolutions hanging over their heads, which begs the question: how do we make those resolutions happen? We were so excited about them on December 31 and then life got in the way,

So you could get a book like The 12-Week Year, but having read that overpuffed magazine piece that The 12-week Year is, I'm here to tell you, whoever praises that book is someone who is so far behind in the race toward maybe not excellence but even just plain competency that it's not even worth listening what they have to say. (A little bit like Amazon after the sex scandal involving Jeff Bezos and his wife's best friend or the ridiculous choice of HQ2.)

So what is left for the rest of us who can see through the most obvious advertising gimmicks but still want to improve ourselves and meet or exceed our New Year goals? WeAchieve.io, is what. Its co-founder Ben Mumma was one of my very best students at Lehigh (and I taught there for 11 years, not counting my sabbatical), and he is the poster boy of analytics, engineering and business coming together to deliver high-value solutions to clients. Over the years several of my Lehigh students have dabbled into entrepreneurship but if someone can turn this into clear, unequivocal success, that will be Ben Mumma. So you might as well check out the WeAchieve app now so you can say you tried it before it was commonplace. Whatever the feeling was to try Facebook circa 2004, WeAchieve replicates it for business-minded professionals, and then some. Just thank him when you have a chance for rescuing you from the abject failure of failing through all of your 2019 goals before January was even over.

Herb Kelleher (1931-2019), Dallas's pioneer of revenue management

Southwest's founder Herb Kelleher died on Thursday. He was a Dallas icon who moved to Texas in 1962 with the goal of starting a career in law and ended up transforming airline revenue management with his low-cost airline. Southwest was launched in 1967 in the Texas Triangle of Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin (Austin is on the way from Dallas to San Antonio, for those who are wondering why it is called a triangle) and is headquartered in Dallas. It even has its own airport, Dallas Love Field, only ten minutes from SMU, much more convenient to reach than the DFW airport that airlines such as American operate out of.

The impact of Southwest on Dallas's image as an innovation hotbed cannot be underestimated. According to the NYT obit, Southwest "has been profitable every year since two years after it was founded. During Mr. Kelleher’s tenure, the company never had a layoff, furlough or pay cut." Would Southwest even have been possible outside Texas? The original idea was inspired by California's Pacific Southwest Airlines, but only one of the two managed to find success as an independent airline. (Pacific Southwest was acquired by USAir in 1988, now American Airlines.) The distances between the four Texas cities and the lack of big cities in-between made airline travel an important option for businessmen and tourists alike. Kelleher's genius was to keep the fleet to a single aircraft type, the Boeing 737, and operate the planes like buses, with no assigned seating but a simple boarding process by group and number. It is hard to imagine such out-of-the-box thinking in the big metropolises of the East Coast. 

In the short time I have worked at SMU, I have seen many of my best students go to work for Southwest to implement cutting-edge management science and operations research. Last year I helped some seniors I had in my analytics class with (the R part of) their capstone projects about block-time scheduling at Southwest. My understanding is that Southwest is an enthusiastic employer of our top Bachelor's and Master's graduates. Kelleher also gave the Commencement Speech at SMU in 2003 and received a honorary degree from SMU at the time. NPR affiliate KERA also put together an outstanding obituary, concluding: "Today, Southwest carries more passengers within the United States than any airline. While critics say Southwest has come to resemble the bigger carriers that it once fought against, it created a model of streamlined operations, low costs and lower fares that spawned similar airlines around the world." What a legacy.

Harvard Business Review November-December 2018

 Here is another issue of HBR I read during the holidays, with a provocative cover article about "The End of Bureaucracy". It includes features on how to unite your senior team (using the example of Swisscom), develop better people analytics (and in particular develop relational analytics, "which examine data on how people interact"), reinvent customer service (an article about T-Mobile), sell new products (discussing a new sales process) and bring your breakthrough ideas to life. This was an HBR issue full of original insights (except perhaps for the article on bringing breakthrough ideas to life, which summarised its insights as platitudes).

This issue provided the annual ranking of the best performing CEOs in the world. Six CEOs have appeared on the list every year for the past five years: Jeffrey Bezos, of Amazon, Pablo Isla of Inditex, Blake Nordstrom of Nordstrom, Paolo Rocca of Tenaris, James Taiclet Jr of American Tower and Renato Alves Vale of CCR. Some interesting tidbits: only 32 out of 100 have an MBA, 34 have an engineering degree and 20 of the CEOs lead companies based outside their countries of birth. Also, "on average they became CEO at age 44 and have been in office 16 years." 87 are insiders and 3 (three!) are women: Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin, Debra Cafaro of Ventas and Nancy McKinstry of Wolters Kluwer.

One article that annoyed me was entitled "Cultivating everyday courage", with the subtitle "The right way to speak truth to power", because it was accompanied by that pathetic picture of the statue of a little girl supposedly standing firm against the bull of Wall Street, when this was really just a ploy by an unknown sculptor to get attention by tying his statue (the little girl) to a far better known one (the bull). You can get a glimpse of the illustration here. And of course many people loved it, because many people don't seem that keen in showing even moderate amounts of discernment and prefer reacting in the way that marketing geniuses have predicted they would. That little girl (statue) wasn't speaking truth to power. It was piggybacking on popular feelings of disenfranchisement so that the public read in it what it wanted to read, and made the little girl statue a social media phenomenon although it wouldn't have withstood scrutiny as a stand-alone statue. For me this statue shows how public opinion can be manipulated, even for HBR readers, who may be better educated than most. Somebody in the HBR office thought it was the right illustration to go with the article. To me it is just a populist, knee-jerk reaction to some people's attempts to get their five minutes of fame. They certainly understand public opinion well. 

The last feature in the magazine was "Life's work" against the back cover, featuring former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who says: ""One of the greatest deficits of leadership is to not command respect for knowing where you want to go" and "You have to compartmentalise [with archenemies of the United States...]. It's the only way to make important things happen." 

Harvard Business Review September-October 2018

 I am catching up on my reading during winter break and one magazine I read recently was the September-October 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review. I am sometimes quite ambivalent about articles published in HBR - for instance the cover story in that issue touts the "business case for curiosity" because "it can improve your firm's adaptability and performance" but it seems like business today is in a very sorry state if managers need to be reminded that being curious in business is better than not being curious, and allowing curiosity among employees is better than not allowing it. Yet, this issue also had some very interesting, thought-provoking gems, so here is what I took away from it.

Lincoln and the Art of Transformative Leadership by Doris Kearns Goodwin. This was a tie-in with the publication of Kearns-Goodwin's new book, which considers the leadership of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. I find myself fortunate to have attended, along with twelve hundred (!) other Dallas history buffs, the event she held near SMU at the Temple Emanu-el when she came to Dallas on tour (needless to say, she didn't stop by Bethlehem, PA), and enjoyed reading this excerpt, since I haven't reached that part in the book yet.

Of course, Lincoln lived in tremendously challenging times and had an extraordinary impact on the United States. It seems trite to draw insights from his leadership for the average HBR reader. Yet, maybe lessons from Lincoln's life can help a few CEOs change the country for the better. Apparently, someone thought as much. So let me list Kearns Goodwin's lessons here, although I don't think they fully reflect Lincoln's wisdom. (I really love her book, and the article isn't uninteresting, but you have to read it in full.) (i) Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction. (duh). (ii) Anticipate contending viewpoints (duh duh) (iii) Know when to hold back and when to move forward. (Lincoln deserves better than this one-liner.) (iv) Set an example. (Sigh.)

(v) Understand the emotional needs of the team (well...) (vi) Refuse to let past resentments fester. (If you only look at the headlines this article isn't worth your time, but actually when you read the text that goes with the headlines it is more interesting than you think.) (vii) Control angry impulses. (Is that the best HBR can do?) (viii) Protect colleagues from blame. (Obvious.) (ix) Keep your word. (Even more obvious.) (x) Gauge sentiment. (What does this even mean?)

(xi) Establish trust. (Based on what I've read of the book so far, Kearns Goodwin provides a very thoughtful analysis of leadership. So perhaps it is time we accept that CEOs don't have as much to bring the world as Lincoln, the 2 Roosevelt or LBJ. Marketing teams at publishing houses can try too hard to make a book seem relevant to a wide readership, when people interested in history are already willing to buy the book, even when it doesn't have a direct relation to their life or work.) 

Navigating Talent Hot Spots by Harvard Business School professor William Kerr. This is a solid article describing "how companies can benefit from innovation centres without necessarily relocating." It starts with a paragraph about GE, which relocated its corporate headquarters from Fairfield, CT to Boston, MA, including a quote from the then-CFO: "I can walk out my door and visit four start-ups. In Fairfield I couldn't even walk out my door and get a sandwich." This is exactly how I feel about Dallas, TX vs Bethlehem, PA. Of course this annoys a lot of academics, because many universities are in the middle of nowhere and it's considered in very bad taste to care about quality of life or anything that isn't about writing research papers, more as a sign of what people feel they have missed out, since I have zero interest in what everyone else is doing. (I learnt late in life that this was a sign of someone happy with her life. I've been able to enjoy cultural opportunities in New York and Dallas that few people can ever dream of. It says something about certain people when they spend more time being jealous of me than trying to make their own life work out the way they want.) 

In his article, Kerr discusses three ways for companies to "harness the benefits of these urban pools of knowledge", from headquarters moves to creating outposts and innovation labs to executive retreats and immersions. I can't resist the opportunity to point out that Amazon, this supposedly behemoth of e-commerce, couldn't even be bothered to implement one of those three options in its search for a second headquarters, in its mistaken desire to either pick the city stupid enough to offer the biggest tax breaks or to believe its workers are already so much better than what's available in Chicago or Dallas. The fact is, as soon as students aren't trained at MIT or Stanford, the risk is great that they can't contribute anything highly innovative to their company. And often in industry companies don't need a lot of innovation but an ability to apply existing knowledge to their specific problem, so it's not a big deal. But it's worth asking what industry really needs to remain cutting-edge. Given the number of students who graduate with a Master's every year, it's possible companies need students with deeper knowledge than that provided by a Master's. But it's also possible that companies don't really need PhD holders. Academia hasn't produced graduates that match industry needs because there is an inherent motivation for professors to graduate PhDs (it is one of the few criteria every university agrees on in trying to establish productivity, whether rightfully or not), although every observation I've had of the industry world suggests students can do very well in it with knowledge below the PhD. 

The Good-Better-Best (GBB) Approach to Pricing. In this article, Rafi Mohammed argues why every company should consider a tiered model. It uses the example of Allstate, which introduced a Value Plan priced 5% below Standard that didn't include accident forgiveness and "a new Gold plan, priced 5% to 7% above Standard, which offered immediate accident forgiveness (no five-year wait)... And at the highest end, a new Platinum Plan (15% above Standard) also included forgiveness for multiple crashes and a safe-driving bonus." 

AllState is a classical example of GBB pricing, although implementation can be tricky due to the risk of cannibalization (customers trading down). Mohammed explains that GBB's benefits can come from three perspectives: "offensive plays aimed at generating new growth and revenue, defensive plays meant to counter or forestall moves by competitors, and behavioral plays that draw on principles of consumer psychology."

Mohammed also explains that a crucial step in devising GBB bundles is "choosing which attributes to add, drop or vary to create different perceptions of value." For instance, he explains that "Netflix prices its streaming service according to the number of devices on which content can be simultaneously viewed" and that "the Princeton Review offers three SAT prep options, ranging from "self-paced" (primarily do-it-yourself online exercises) to private tutoring." As other examples, Federal Express "offers a variety of next-day delivery options in major cities, often including 8:30am, 10:30am and 3:30pm" and memberships to (friends of) the Boston Symphony Orchestra "vary in such things as access to intimate gatherings with musicians, invitations to rehearsals and behind-the-scenes lectures."

The issue also discusses how to deal with initiative overload, why design thinking works and lessons from Alibaba, "China's innovative digital giant". Overall, while some articles can be summarized in more obvious ways that match common sense than others, the issue demonstrated why HBR remains the leading business publication for C-suite executives.

The end of the circus

I'm so glad that Amazon.com didn't pick Dallas as its HQ2. Mostly I'm glad out of self-interest, because I didn't want the increase in real estate prices and traffic that such a decision would have brought, but I'm also glad because the whole spectacle of cities abasing themselves to try to attract oh-so-important Amazon.com was disgraceful. Given that Amazon.com thinks it's ok (and perhaps even entertaining, for whoever came up with the idea) to let local governments prostrate themselves at its feet with enormous tax credits that would be better spent on its local workforce, there's just no way that this company - which has been in the news for its poor working conditions at its warehouses and caps salaries at $160k a year with the rest in stock options that naturally have to vest before employees can exercise them, trapping staff in a vicious circle but starkly aligning everyone's interest with the increase in the fortune of billionaire Jeff Bezos - cares about its workers or even its customers. The "customer obsession" motto is just a convenient way to try to get some pressure off its back by pretending to care while Amazon.com is busy enriching itself. 

Not that it has an easy way of it. If Amazon.com was making so much money, it wouldn't have to resort to tricks to get more money from its customers. For instance, whenever you (or at least I) click on the MP3 version of an album, Amazon.com redirects you to the "Streaming Unlimited" page even if you didn't click on it. Amazon.com also spends considerable amounts of time getting customers to sign up for Amazon Prime. Let's be clear: if Amazon.com was losing money on it, it wouldn't push it so hard. Membership services are priced so that a few users come out with a net gain and many lose, because they just don't use the service enough to make the membership worth it. I'd love to try Audible if I could listen to recordings of books on a one-by-one basis, the way you select Kindle editions individually, but the only way to get audiobooks is to sign up for a membership, and of course Amazon.com says you can cancel any time, but they know people tend to have inertia once they've signed up for something. 

I've also been puzzled by many of Amazon.com's tactical decisions. In Dallas the same-day delivery option is priced way too low compared to standard shipping. (I suspect one day they will jack up the prices so that you can't get your item fast unless you sign up for Amazon Prime.) This leads to a lot of last-minute orders, lack of visibility for the local warehouses and delivery issues. I've had several times an Amazon carrier pretend he couldn't deliver to my address due to some non-existent access code that I supposedly hadn't provided (although Amazon has successfully delivered thousands of packages to my building), which just so happened to be at the end of the carrier's delivery window. Surprise! The carrier can't deliver within the time window and comes up with an excuse to avoid taking the blame. So much for customer obsession. Do you think someone at Amazon.com is looking into this to try to tease out signs the pricing and delivery routes are suboptimal? Think again. But then by now, you've probably noticed that Amazon.com's recommendation system at the bottom of every Amazon.com page just lists what some other random people have bought, without any attempt of filtering items that clearly have no connection whatsoever with the book. (This is particularly obvious for books with low inventory turnover.)

Even Jeff Bezos knows he might have pushed too hard on that one, because after it was announced that the HQ2 would be split (apparently the tax incentives were too good to pass up, so it looks like someone came up with the brilliant idea of getting them twice) between Queens in New York (does that make anyone dream?) and Crystal City, VA outside D.C. he said something along the lines of "one day Amazon will fail." He's doing a phenomenal job making Amazon the most hated company in America, a spot that used to be Microsoft's, and we all know how that story ended up. (Short memory? Two words: antitrust lawsuit.)

Another hint that he might be realizing it is that people started talking about how DC and NYC had the most tech workers. As if people would've moved to Seattle if it weren't for Amazon. Seattle is really far out of the way from a continental U.S. perspective, and while it has some good entertainment opportunities and decent seafood restaurants, it is hard to escape the feeling it is a backwater town with a gorgeous view of the Pacific Ocean. Now given the hours of Amazon employees, being a backwater town isn't a bad thing: there are plenty of outdoors activities anyway. But anyone who says Seattle is a foodie town hasn't lived in cities with superior restaurants. (And again, the usefulness of top restaurants for the Amazon workforce is open for debate. Good options to eat at your desk might be just as useful.)

Sad also is the spectacle of naive journalists babbling along on the fact that the most valuable info Amazon.com got was the data from each city that competed from HQ2. When you look at how little they use their own data for their operations (recommender systems, delivery routes), you can be left with no doubt whatsoever that they don't care about the data they collected and only wanted to make the maximum number of cities humiliate themselves. 

I hope one of those cities that competed for HQ2 will announce that they will spend what they would have given to Amazon.com on incentives for their local workforce, such as free community college education or college loans forgiveness for residents. It is time to make something good out of that sorry spectacle of American capitalism at its worst.

HBR IdeaCast: The Future of (MBA) Education

Over the past several years, there's been a lot of talk about transforming education with breakthrough ideas such as using online courses -- often Massive Online Open Courses -- to gain knowledge or bypassing college altogether, but sometimes the change that lasts comes from more incremental innovation. I was reminded of that while I was listening to a HBR IdeaCast podcast from earlier this year (HBR IdeaCast is the podcast of Harvard Business Review) on The Future of MBA Education.

In this podcast, the Dean of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business talks about how his program aims at bringing together the school world of learning business fundamentals in a classroom and the work world of learning by doing into one integrated framework of experiential learning. This, to me, is also the future of higher education in general. I've always been struck by the missed opportunity (from a university perspective) of having students do summer internships without even debriefing them at the end of the summer on what their courses should have better prepared them for, let alone mentoring and advising them in the process. For instance, I started teaching Tableau (a visualization software useful for descriptive analytics) to my students after I learned from students returning from internships that Tableau had become extremely popular in the consulting world. If students hadn't bothered mentioning it to me, I would never have known I could give my students a competitive advantage in the workplace by introducing all of them to Tableau before graduation. As students seek better value for their tuition money, it is critical that all educational experiences build upon each other. 

Yet, integrating such experiences take time and effort. Someone must coordinate courses and supervise students. In effect, students almost need a coach as their academic advisor, to define with them growth experiences and go over what worked and what didn't in previous assignments. (This is not the same role as the direct internship supervisor at the company, with whom an intern might be more reluctant to share difficulties in completing his tasks, since he might hope for a job offer at the end of the summer.) At a time where people worry about tuition costs, we have to be careful not to add more costs to the college experience. But my observations in my own line of work, especially of the finalist teams for the UPS George D Smith Award recognizing programs best preparing tomorrow's practitioners in operations research and management science, suggest that top programs these days implement such an integrated approach. It is easier to do at the graduate rather than undergraduate level, whether for Masters of Science programs in Business Analytics or Masters of Engineering in Operations Research or related disciplines, because of the more focused nature of these programs compared to Bachelor's degrees. It certainly shouldn't be limited to MBA programs.  

As a starting point, it would be useful for Master's programs to have a debriefing process at the beginning of the second year of study, especially to understand how students could have been better prepared for their summer internship if they did one. It would also be important to review degree plans to better understand how the courses are supposed to fit with each other. Instructors can easily lose sight of the other courses students are taking concurrently and the ones they have already taken, creating overlaps or assuming knowledge that hasn't been acquired yet. Of course, some overlap is sometimes necessary and even welcome in providing a different look on the same topic, and the directors of programs that give students a lot of choices about their course of study can't keep track of the "big picture" for every single student. But presenting a solid integrated program rather than a disjointed collection of courses can only be a good thing, especially for programs without a capstone requirement to tie everything together.

This quote by the Dean of the Ross School of Business particularly resonated with me. "[N]ow the content is largely commoditized in that it’s accessible to the world. And so, now what that does is it frees us up to create experiences that can truly transform how people think and how they act, how they connect with others, how they actually engage in the doing of business...And so, having these types of experiences that are going to better prepare you and ready you for not only day one on the job of today, but actually, give you the mindset and the skillset to thrive in the career of tomorrow."

Another great idea in the podcast is the "7-year MBA" (an expression due to Dartmouth), where seven years refers not to the time it takes to complete all the MBA requirements but the two years of the degree and the first five years following that degree. Similar ideas include Stanford's open-loop university, where "once you start you can always loop back and come back into the university and your learning never stops" and Michigan's Alumni Advantage for executive education. Whatever the future of education, surely continuing education and lifelong learning will be a part of it. 

Jeff Bezos at SMU

Last week I attended Jeff Bezos's talk at SMU when he visited Dallas. (The talk was hosted by the George W. Bush Presidential Center's Forum on Leadership.) Bezos didn't drop any hint about Amazon's HQ2, but he still shared some interesting tidbits. The most important one for me, as an analytics professional, was (I paraphrase) "when the anecdote and the data tell a different story, believe the anecdote". This resonated for me because not too long ago I ordered something on Amazon using one-day delivery and at the end of the day I got a message saying that because the access codes to my residence had changed, the carrier had been unable to deliver my package that day and would attempt again the same day. Now, I get plenty of packages delivered from Amazon without any problem. There is no need for access codes to deliver packages, and so the access codes definitely hadn't changed, since they don't exist.

When I first read that email I found that statement outrageous and wanted to contact Amazon to get a refund on the delivery fee. (It is, after all, easy enough to check I've had plenty of packages delivered without an issue in the past.) But I came to realize it was the end of the day and the courier had probably run out of time in his shift and so he told the Amazon system it was my fault he couldn't deliver my package to avoid getting penalized. From a data perspective, my package doesn't get counted as late. From an anecdote perspective, it's a good thing my Keurig coffee machine, which was giving signs of imminent demise, decided to survive one more day so that I could face the world my usual cheerful self, and so I didn't report the issue to Amazon. But you have to wonder, what on-time delivery metrics mean if they can be gamed so easily.

I also liked Bezos's attitude toward memos and meetings: the idea is that each meeting starts with half an hour where meeting attendees read the memo in silence, because otherwise people might be tempted to pretend having read the memo when they were actually too busy to find the time to. He also had a great anecdote about how he thought, when Amazon was just starting out and he was on the floor on his knees packing people's orders, it'd be excellent to buy kneepads, at which point someone else in the room looked at him as if this was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard and replied "what we need is packing tables". Also, people thought he was crazy when he decided to publish all customers' reviews instead of just the positive ones, but he realized early Amazon was in the business of helping people make purchase decisions, rather than make people buy something they won't necessarily like (thus making them more likely to shop elsewhere next time).

I wasn't as interested in his discussion about space and I would've wanted some more deep insights, but overall it was an enjoyable talk. You can watch it here. 

Talk by Google Cloud COO at INFORMS WORMS event

 Diane Bryant, COO of Google Cloud after spending 32 years at Intel, gave a phenomenal talk at the INFORMS Analytics conference, invited by Women in OR/MS and sponsored by Intel (a big thank you to Intel for the drink tickets!) From the moment she mentioned joining a jazz band in high school in the 1970s because her friend didn’t want to be the only woman in the band, Bryant managed to hit that sweet spot combining insights and wit that kept her audience engaged and laughing.

Her talk was structured around sponsorship, confidence and inclusion. Starting with inclusion, she mentioned that only 6% of Intel VP at first were women, and then Bryant and her fellow female VPs started a formal advocacy program that brought the number of female VPs to 21%. Another take-away message was the importance of projecting confidence – a skill men appear to be much better at than women. Regarding sponsorship, Bryant underlined the importance of advocacy not mentorship. Mentorship is good when you need advice from someone not in the line of command, but according to research sponsored by Intel, men are sponsored and women are mentored, and guess who have the most successful careers? Bryant told an insightful story there about the days when she was a waitress for Sunday brunch and a Distinguished Engineer at the local company (biggest employer in Sacramento where she lived) only wanted to sit at her table with his wife for Sunday brunch because she was great at refilling his and his wife's cup of coffee and getting their order out of the kitchen fast. Ultimately, he recommended her for a job at his company – she got offers from two different groups and she didn’t even have to interview, thanks to the strength of his recommendation. Bryant also put forward the Amber principle (the female equivalent to the Peter principle): “women rise to their level of self doubt”. She doesn’t believe in luck to explain people’s career success - allies are needed. My favorite statement of hers was: “You can’t ask the marginalized population to fix the marginalization,” leading her to conclude: “We have to engage the men.”

I also liked the moment when she said: “Diversity is a fact but inclusion is a choice”. She also showed a good quote about Warren Buffett talking about his sister, who he said was smarter than he was, and (WB) stating that he only had to compete against half the talent. Bryant mentioned China where 40% of the talent in STEM is female, vs 23% in the U.S. Finally she pointed out the need to worry not about the hard decisions (the reason you can’t decide is that both outcomes are usually similar) but the easy one where everyone is in agreement, sometimes leading to very bad decisions, such as PR nightmares that came from very poorly thought-out ads.

For me the most touching moment came toward the end when Bryant disclosed that her father, who did time at San Quentin's maximum security prison, kicked her out of the house when she was 18, although she still had 4 months to go before graduating from high school. She didn’t say, although she could have: and yet, look at her now. Bryant’s resilience in spite of such adversity was an inspiration to everyone in the room. To finish, Bryant had this great anecdote at the end about her son who went to a playdate at a new friend’s house and, seeing that his friend had an amazing house, exclaimed “what does YOUR mother do?” Welcome to the 21^st century, where hopefully more women will get the jobs they deserve thanks to the advice of women like Diane Bryant.

PhD in Analytics

The issue that most animated the audience at the Meeting of Analytics Program Directors in Baltimore a few days ago came up last during the day-long event, during the session about industry perspectives: the idea of a PhD in Analytics. Because this was part of a panel discussion with industry experts and because analytics is applied to real-life data almost by definition, the impression I got was that such a PhD would be mostly geared toward producing doctoral-level industry practitioners, although a PhD is supposed to produce new knowledge beyond the deliverables of an industry project.

The discussion turned into a very lively exchange because an attendee from a business school mentioned that PhD graduates who go to industry are a fail for his program, and one of the industry panelists, with a little smirk on her face that she probably shouldn't have had, replied that she'd like to challenge that notion.

Of course that was  easy for her to say, since she gets highly-trained PhDs who, as soon as they graduate, lose any interest in publishing the research papers they have in the pipeline and focus on solving their companies' problems to achieve the non-minor goal of remaining gainfully employed. But from the standpoint of that other faculty member in a business school whose program is tuition-funded, the fact that research papers won't be able to be revised in a timely fashion and may not have the impact they should have because the lead student left for industry is not a successful outcome, both from the viewpoint of the dean who funded that student and from the viewpoint of the faculty member who needs those research papers to get promoted.

I do love that in the United States, people with PhDs are not limited to teaching jobs in universities but can have their skills recognized and sought after by top companies, and I am particularly proud of my own PhD students' placement record at companies such as Amazon, IBM, Marriott, JP Morgan and Ernst & Young, but it is a fact that faculty's research output suffers from their doctoral students going to industry because a lot of research papers are then put in limbo. When that happens, the business programs that funded those students don't get the best return for their money, and the federal agencies that funded research assistantships for doctoral students through grants don't get the best return for their money either.

Should we all refuse to let our students graduate until the revision of the last paper has been submitted, even if that means the student has to start working without having her PhD yet? This is a very different situation than that of a Master's student in analytics, who gets a grade for her capstone project before graduation. Yet, there is no doubt that Master's programs are becoming too short to completely train students in the full scope of data analytics, from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics to prescriptive analytics, and from small data to big data.

In fact a lesson I learned from another session at the MAPD is that traditional operations research skills such as optimization (prescriptive analytics) risk getting shortchanged because companies understand predictive analytics best and don't yet understand what they can do with the more advanced prescriptive analytics. If we only teach to what companies want, we won't produce graduates with the skills they will need to succeed in the workforce 5 years from now when companies start seeing the benefits of prescriptive analytics and decide to leverage those as well. We do have to be careful not to teach reactively to what companies think they want today. As academics, we also have to protect our students' interests and also our own careers in ensuring the concept of a PhD is not denatured through industry pressures.

So what is the solution? Multiple Master's in various branches of analytics? A Master's and a continuing education program? A Master's and a training program held at the companies themselves for its data scientists? A PhD? Or a more applied degree with a new name that would sit between the Master's and the PhD and be geared toward industry placement?