The degree I had earned in philosophy seemed to qualify me to sit in a corner of the president's office and comment profoundly on various goings on. As the company didn't have anyone performing that service, I was allowed the inside track for the position, provided that I agreed to work on the shipping dock until the need arose. So I happily accepted the job and waited for the opportunity to help the company understand the metaphysical foundation of its accounts payable system or the epistemological implications of its cycle count program.

My boss on the shipping dock was only a few years older than I and had a business degree. It appeared that was the path to the top and I decided to educate myself through reading. But try as I might, I could not impress anyone with my grasp of lot sizing formulas, slack time rations and other leading edge subjects of the 1960s. I began to suspect I was the only one reading this stuff.

I became a manager a year later and, in the next 30 years, never met an operations person who read research papers by academicians. Then and now most of this research doesn't seem to relate to my world in quite the right way. And it's not that I believe this research is irrelevant or a waste of money. I am not one to insist that all research eventually pay for itself via a utilitarian improvement in something or other. Research for its own sake is fine with me because anything that adds to the overall knowledge of mankind is self-justifying in my philosophy. So academicians writing for each other's amazement and amusement falls within my definition of progress and the elevation of the human species. But do they realize how few practitioners are paying attention?

So much of operations management research attempts to reduce problems to a mathematical formula that allows us to solve for X. Technical problems can be reduced to a formula, but my problems are seldom technical. My problems are rooted in top management having expectations out of sync with operational reality, self-defensive middle managers barricading their areas behind suboptimized disciplines, and procedures and first line supervisors that see themselves as extensions of the hourly work force instead of extensions of management.

Veteran operations people seek relief in areas of psychology, group dynamics, motivation, leadership training and matching the person to the job. These are the "soft" skills so valued by every manufacturing executive I've ever talked to or heard speak. But this is not front burner stuff in the world of operations research.

I'd like to see a little balance. For every paper inflicting a new lot sizing formula on the world, give us a paper describing a successful program of tying supervisor's performance reviews to the cycle count accuracy of the parts over which they have inventory transaction responsibility. For every bottleneck scheduling formula so complex it can't be understood by factory people and will only become a focus for discontentment, give us a financial and moral analysis of investing in sufficient capacity to allow us to use easily understood schedules based on customer demand. You get the idea.

A few years ago I treated a professor of business administration to my views on all this, and he replied that it was his job to point the path and my job to figure out how to travel it. This professor was working on a bottleneck scheduling formula that would strike a balance between minimizing setups and minimizing the financial impact of lost orders caused by the bottleneck. Another example of solving for X and believing the world will be a better place. He could not understand why someone in my job was not eagerly awaiting his paper. I told him I could address my bottlenecks better by developing more credible time standards on parts routed across constrained machines. He replied, as I knew he would, that improved accuracy in time standards would only add precision to the size of the constraint; it would not increase capacity. I replied that if top management really believed the numbers, they would more likely add additional capacity. He completely missed my point because he viewed a bottleneck as a problem to be minimized via a technical solution, while I viewed it as a problem to be eliminated via a people solution.

Friends in manufacturing say I'm naïve to expect academicians to publish much that's actually helpful. They claim the world of academia is driven by a publish or perish imperative with rules that have precious little relation to real operations problems. Perhaps, but I'm a hopeful person. After 30 years I'm still waiting for the job of company philosopher to open up.