Good News at the Membership Meeting

Having arrived later than expected (if anyone is looking for an OR project for a class, baggage claim at CLT can use the help), I headed in the direction of registration, planning to skip the Membership Meeting. That plan died when I bumped into the benevolent goddess of DSI (am I allowed to mention competing societies here?), Professor Kathy Stecke of UT-Dallas, who insisted that I join her at the MM first (and who “fake married” me in a quick ceremony presided over by nobody, so that I could partake of the MM and associated open bar without my ID badge).

Besides scoring a free beer or two (and the shortest marriage by anyone not named Kardashian), I was treated to a very upbeat and deftly run meeting, courtesy of INFORMS president Rina Schneur. (Academic committee meetings should be run this tightly — although the shock would probably do in more than a few of my colleagues.) The metrics were favorable: membership is up; attendance at the meeting seems to be at least a local max; and the budget is showing a surplus (at least before the bar tab was reconciled). The current and incoming officers were introduced, and I finally got to meet Melissa Moore (previously a disemboided voice during IT committee conference calls).

After the MM, my interim spouse kindly invited me to the UT-D potty … which, after adjusting for her Kennedy-level Boston accent (and much to my relief) turned out to be a party. There I had a chance to chat with Doug Samuelson, who (among many activities) writes the end-of-issue column for OR/MS Today. Doug’s column provides a number of valuable managerial insights of sufficient generality that I got mileage out of at least one while teaching — pardon my language — organizational behavior. Sadly, there does not seem to be a reliable mechanism for disseminating these insights to the needy. Hopefully in the Web 2.0+ era, we’ll find them collected and indexed someplace accessible in the near future.