Q&A: Meet the new executive director

Melissa Moore (left) chats with INFORMS President-Elect Terry Harrison at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research in Chicago.

By Peter Horner

Melissa Moore, a former top executive with two engineering associations, was named executive director of INFORMS earlier this year following a six-month, nationwide search. Moore officially took the reins of the day-to-day management of the Institute on April 4, replacing interim Executive Director Terry Cryan, who remains in her post as INFORMS’ director of meetings.

OR/MS Today editor Peter Horner interviewed Moore on April 11 – the one-week anniversary of her first day on the new job – in the midst of the successful INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research in Chicago that drew a record number of attendees. Following are excerpts from the interview.

You’ve been on the job a week. What’s your impression of INFORMS so far?

There’s so much energy and excitement about where INFORMS is going and what INFORMS already is and what it can be as an organization. I’m really looking forward to being a part of it. Just about everyone you talk to at this meeting is really hyped and excited about the future direction of INFORMS and taking advantage of all that O.R. has to offer.

What’s your impression of the members you’ve had a chance to meet?

More than anything else at this conference I’m trying to meet as many members and non-members as I can. I want to talk to them about what they need and want from INFORMS, now and in the future. When they have gone looking for something at INFORMS and haven’t found it, what was it? I’m trying to make sure that I connect with what INFORMS customers want. From my standpoint, this meeting is purely about listening and hearing from members and non-members on their view of the world and INFORMS, and so far I’ve been very impressed.

When you were interviewing with the board, you presumably talked about strategic planning. Regardless of the organization, board members typically have lots of ideas, but implementing them is a different story. I assume that will be one of your central roles. How do you get from point A to point B in any organization that might instinctively resist change?

All organizations, and all people for that matter, resist change. There is a small subset of people that just go running toward change, but that’s unusual. Usually change comes down to the following question: Is the pain of not changing worse than the pain of changing? When you tip the balance in favor of change, people generally say, “Yes, we need to go there.”

The question then becomes, is it a true change or is it just an evolution, a movement toward where you’re supposed to be in the first place?

When I look at strategic planning within INFORMS, it’s really a question of listening to what the members want, listening to the different parts of the organization, and working with the board and the leadership of the organization to say, “OK, this is who we are and this is where we want to go.” You start by having a true set of goals and build toward them.

Do you see your role as executive director more as executing the board’s ideas or advising the board on where the organization should be heading based on your experience with other, similar organizations?

It’s a balancing act. It’s all of the above. As an executive director you are helping to make sure that the leadership knows what is possible in terms of association management. What are other associations doing that are very successful? It’s very much what INFORMS does and all the members do within their own companies. You benchmark and you step back and you say, “What things are out there and what is possible to do in terms of services for members.” At the same time, the board decides what the priorities are. All I do is create the pathway to facilitate. The board decides where the Institute should go, and my job is to work with them to get us there.

During the interview process, were any specific goals for the Institute brought up, such as, “We want to have 20,000 members in five years”?

The most important thing is the recognition that we need to develop a strategic plan and have our financial budgeting process fit that strategic plan so that we have the resources tied to the plan as opposed to doing them in two separate efforts. Part of this will be an IT strategic plan to make sure that all of the different resources are tied to an overall strategic plan for the Institute. Those are some key things that I will be working on.

At this conference, you keep hearing the words “analytics, analytics, analytics,” which makes sense, given the name and purpose of the meeting. Yet the emphasis on “analytics” makes some “old guard” members of INFORMS who’ve taught or practiced “operations research” for 50 years a little nervous. How does the Institute “finesse” that change?

As we look at the analytic initiative there is always a concern that the board has and everyone has: You don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You make sure that this complements the traditional O.R. roots of the Institute. We make sure that as we move more into “analytics,” which is the language that business understands, that we realize that operations research is what makes analytics possible in many ways. I’m not an O.R. person and I’m not an analytics person, but that’s how I see and understand the situation.

Do you have an engineering background?

I am not an engineer. I have worked for engineering societies since the early 1980s. The background I bring is how to run an institute, a professional society, in a way that gets the services and the benefits and the programs to the members. Make sure that everything remains heading in one direction as opposed to getting splintered along the way with stops and starts. When you look at the balance between O.R. and analytics, at least in my one week of awareness, I think that their futures seem to be very much tied to each other. As analytics continues to be requested by business, the O.R. professionals who do the advanced analytics and basically provide the tools and do the research on how to do analytics, they become more important to those who are doing analytics.

Are all the pieces in place to get where the board wants to go and for you to help the Institute get there?

Every non-profit organization has strengths and weaknesses, and we also have challenges on resources. It’s a constant challenge, because any time there are a few dollars left over, someone’s always going to come up with an idea on how to use them. So the challenge is always going to be there; that’s why the board recognizes that a strategic plan is so important and the goals and metrics in that strategic plan are so important. We want to make sure that resources are put toward the things that the leadership of the organization believes are important to the future of the organization, as opposed to continually doing things just because someone came up with a good idea.

Not to beat this strategic planning topic to death, but just to be clear, is there currently a strategic plan in place or is that your first order of business?

That’s part of what we will be doing this first quarter of my tenure and probably the rest of the year.

And when that’s done, will that be a road map for five or 10 years out? What’s the end product?

The end product is going to be a strategic plan for the organization, and that could mean different things to different people. Some organizations just want to know what the threats and opportunities are and then look at goals that will mitigate the threats and take advantage of the opportunities. For some organizations, the strategic plan is simply the direction they want to go. For others, they would like to do something that is far more elaborate that has very high-arching goals that could last years, goals that could be so broad that you could come up with shorter-term goals for the next 20 years that would still fit into those over-arching goals. Somewhere between those extremes is where we will be.

Will it be a written document?

It will be a written document, yes, and it will be something that I hope is going to have member involvement beyond just those people who are leaders of the organization.

Will the document be made public?

Yes, very much so. I think the best thing would be to publish the strategic plan in OR/MS Today with commentary by the president and the president-elect. Both of them together because the presidents are very clearly working as a team to ensure there’s continuity among the leadership. That is extremely valuable to the Institute, and it’s a neat dynamic to watch.

Let’s shift to your personal strategic planning. How did you end up in association management? You don’t major in something like that, do you?

No, you don’t. I majored in political science in college. One of the reasons that I majored in political science was then I could take all the classes I loved – sociology, English, history, economics, philosophy – and they all one way or the other worked toward my political science degree. So in many ways I found that the things I enjoy, the things that were important to me in terms of what makes me happy in my work, are business economics, making sure those numbers all work and working with people. The last piece was really the politics of working with people: How do people interact and react; how do you make sure that the different sides come together and develop consensus? When you have opposing points of view, how do you get people moving together toward one unified mission? Those are the things I love, those challenges, and I thought, “Oh, that must be lobbying!” I started out working for a U.S. senator from California.

Are you from California?

No, I’m from Illinois originally. It just happened that I knew someone who worked in this senator’s office and they happened to be looking for a legislative assistant. Usually they hire someone from their own state, so I was very lucky. So that was the first step.

And the next step?

That next step was working in government relations for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. That was quite a stint in their Washington, D.C., office and I had a wonderful time. Then I started interviewing with big lobbying firms. Every single one of them informed me basically that they would tell me who my clients were going to be and what I was going to lobby on. I started to realize that I have to believe in what I am selling. I have to believe in the arguments I’m making.

So …

So I put my thinking cap back on and thought, “Hmmm, I can’t sell it if I don’t believe it. Getting random clients and lobbying for them probably wouldn’t work for me. I can’t work to bring people together if I don’t firmly believe that this is the right thing to do.”

So I ended up going back to engineering societies and worked for the American Association of Engineering Societies, which is really an umbrella organization. While there I went from public affairs to managing director and got much more into the management end of it. From there I went on to become executive director of another organization and started realizing that association management really does hit all the pieces that I was looking for.

At INFORMS, you’re going to be dealing with some incredibly smart people. How do you tell them “no” on occasion?

The question is, are you actually telling them “no,” or are you helping them come to the realization that “no” is the right answer without you telling them that? If someone looks at you and just says “no,” there is an immediate reaction that’s human nature, especially with people who are incredibly smart. The immediate reaction to a flat out “no” is, “Ah, that’s throwing down the gauntlet. Who are you to tell me no?” It really creates a battle situation.

When you are running an association, institute or society that is solely there for the benefit of the members, anytime someone brings a new idea or a new approach to something or they want something that we don’t provide, I never say a blanket, “No, it’s not going to happen.” Instead, it’s more along the lines of, “Now that might be worth thinking about. First let me look and see if there’s any way to do it within our current framework.” And if I find out that that might not be the case or probably the wrong direction for us to go, then I might say, “Well, what do you think about this?” Lay out alternatives or different approaches. Tell them, “This is the thought process I went through, and I’m kind of coming to this conclusion. Is there something I have missed in this process? Help me to come to the right conclusion for INFORMS.” Invariably when I invite someone to come along that path with me, we come to a workable conclusion together.

One of your successes at your previous engineering society was increasing the membership.

We tripled the number of new members coming in each year.

Where is “growing INFORMS membership” on the priority list and how will you grow INFORMS membership, which has remained fairly stagnant until an uptick this year?

You’re right. It is upticking, which is wonderful. We are ahead of last year already, and this meeting is another example of that.

Along these lines, a few things will be moving simultaneously. One is obviously strategic planning budgeting and all the aspects of strategic planning, whether it’s IT, future planning or financial strategic planning. All of that is a priority, the main priority. Figuring out how we approach analytics as a new initiative and everything that entails is a priority that will probably be part of the strategic plan. If it isn’t somewhere in the strategic plan, than the question becomes, Why are we doing it?

Membership is a question of looking at the value proposition that we offer our members. Ask a member, what do you get out of INFORMS, what is the No. 1 thing that matters to you when you write your membership check every year? OK, now give me two and three.

It’s all about value proposition – we need to make sure we are completely aware of what that is and then be able to take that to those people that should be members that aren’t currently and say, “Why?” We need to start talking to people we know should be members but aren’t, just to find out if we are sending them the wrong message, are we reaching them, have they even heard about INFORMS? We need to understand what is going on out there.

Through Analytics magazine, for example, I know we’ve attracted several thousand subscribers who aren’t INFORMS members, and many of them are here at this conference. Many of them have joined INFORMS, but many more have not. Are people just not joining associations anymore?

People are still joining professional societies. There is a difference between joining organizations or leagues such as the Lions Club or a bowling league that fit your personal tastes and lifestyle versus joining a professional society or institute that enhances your professional identity, helps you remain current in your profession and provides professional resources and benefits. That’s where the services of INFORMS come in. When these professionals look at what they need or when they have a question, where do they go? Do they go to INFORMS because it’s quick and easy to find what they’re looking for, or do they go somewhere else?

Not to put you on the spot one week into your new job, but based on what you’ve seen do far about INFORMS and the analytics business movement, what do you see as far as the potential of INFORMS in terms of membership growth and corporate impact?

The potential is amazing. The potential reach that INFORMS, O.R. and analytics have is incredible. Someone I talked to at this conference compared O.R. and analytics to Intel, with the chip inside. A number of years ago Intel was providing the chip in almost every computer, but nobody knew about Intel, and they didn’t know that it was an Intel chip that was running all these things. Then Intel started the whole advertising campaign about “Intel inside,” and all a sudden that became a selling point – did a computer have an Intel chip inside versus another one?

It raised awareness for people that the chip was important, and in reality it’s in every single machine that you have when you didn’t know it existed. In many ways, O.R. and analytics are in every business out there. It’s in every single government office, even down to the city councilman; he or she does analytics whether they know it or not. They are constantly looking at who are their constituents, what are their constituents’ needs, what are their main drivers? While they are doing a low-level descriptive analytics, they are still doing analytics.

The somewhat blurry line between “O.R.” and “analytics” reminds me of a recent conversation I had over fish. Several years ago, a fish-marketing monger renamed “Pantagonia Toothfish” as “Chilean Sea Bass,” and suddenly it was on every restaurant’s menu.

I will not go so far as to say that “operations research” and “analytics” are interchangeable or that one is taking over the other. I feel much more comfortable with the “Intel inside” analogy. I think that when we look at the parts of the organization, you have O.R. and you have analytics. If we want to be very contrary and split the society in two, we can say they are different and we must choose one or the other. In reality they aren’t. There are synergies between the two; they both need each other. They are so complementary. As you get better at analytics, you need O.R. tools. You have to have those in order to do analytics. In reality, in order for O.R. to get more recognition of the benefits and the great driver of data and business strategy that O.R. provides, it needs analytics to help those people along.

O.R. is all about measuring success. How will you measure your success in terms of your management of the Institute a year or two from now?

In reality the board and the executive committee will make that determination for me. I think for me it would be that our members are really excited about INFORMS; that the passion and the excitement that we have at this meeting about the future and where we are going, we have two years from now. That to me would be successful.

Peter Horner (horner@lionhrtpub.com) is the editor of OR/MS Today and Analytics (www.analytics-magazine.com).