INFORMS News: Position Statement: Stephen M. Robinson

Stephen M. Robinson

It is an honor to have been nominated for president of INFORMS. The president has to make sure that INFORMS understands its environment, knows what it has to do to succeed in that environment and does those necessary things. All other functions of the presidency are secondary.

Understanding the environment includes knowing not only what the situation is now but also how it’s likely to change over time. An organization has to know these things in every significant area in which it works, and for INFORMS the number of these areas is very large. An example of an area in which we’ve seen enormous change in the last 20 years and will certainly see much more in the next 20, is publications. The massive shift away from print and toward online access has reshaped not only the functions but also the economics of this area, and INFORMS – which has depended on publications for well over half of its revenue – is right in the middle of this change.

No individual can really understand all the areas of INFORMS’ activities, so many people – volunteers as well as staff – have to participate in this effort to understand, with each contributing in her or his area of expertise. The president does very little of the actual assessment work, but is responsible for seeing that the work gets done well. The president also has to represent the organization to outside agencies. Each of those tasks requires an understanding of the organization and how its pieces fit together. I served four years as secretary, four years as treasurer and three years in charge of publications, and that ought to help.

Knowing what an organization like INFORMS needs to do requires having a strategy and using it to guide operations. To keep up the ability to do this requires also developing people – both staff and volunteers – and putting them in the right places for contribution. Each of these three processes – people, strategy and operations – has to operate well and to be linked effectively to the other two.

Maintaining these processes and their links can be tricky in a nonprofit operation in which staff and volunteers each play key roles. INFORMS has done a generally good job in developing staff, but there’s room for improvement in the way we develop volunteers. For this to happen well, INFORMS needs to involve a spectrum of people with different characteristics and different experiences, and to have methods in place to help them to develop and to contribute. This is especially important in an organization with the enormous breadth of INFORMS with its array of communities. The experience I’ve had in reviewing and assessing organizations, in government as well as in the nonprofit sector, should help in the how-to part of this task.

Execution – getting done the things that have to be done – is often hardest of the three main tasks. There’s no magic bullet; people have to commit, act, report, check and do all the other things needed to make sure that it is done right. Within the functional areas, leaders under the supervision of the executive director can make sure their people are doing this, but at the top the president has to ensure not only that execution happens throughout the organization, but also that it is visible so that the Board and the executive committee can be sure that things are moving – or fix the situation if they aren’t.

If these three areas work the way they should, the organization has an excellent chance to survive and to succeed. If elected, I will do my best to ensure that INFORMS does both.

Stephen M. Robinson is professor emeritus of Industrial and Systems Engineering and of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on whose faculty he served during 1972-2007. Robinson also holds the rank of colonel (retired) in the Army of the United States. His research specialty is in variational analysis and optimization. He is author, co-author or editor of seven books and more than 100 scientific research papers. He holds the honorary doctor’s degree from the University of Zürich, the George B. Dantzig Prize of MPS and SIAM, the John K. Walker Jr. Award of the Military Operations Research Society and the George E. Kimball Medal of INFORMS. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a National Associate of the National Research Council, a Fellow of INFORMS and a Fellow of SIAM.