I would like to take a few moments at the beginning of my report to make a few general comments.

First of all, I can't help but think of the similarity between this job and a Dean's job in the university world. Most Deans figure out sooner or later that they don't really have any power. The faculty have it. There's a little ditty about this that we faculty members sometimes whisper among ourselves at faculty meetings:

"Deans make speeches and think they are king,
but fa-cul-ty just do their thing."

I think that it may be a similar situation here at INFORMS. I can give all the talks I want, I can send all the emails I want (and I do) ... but in the end the Board Members, committees, editors, and subdivisions are going to do what they think is best. That's the way it is in an all-volunteer organization, and probably that's the way it should be when the people are this good. Nonetheless I will be undaunted and continue as best I can.
 

TOP PRIORITIES

Let me start with my top priorities. I have just three of these, and they are the same ones that my first President's Desk column described, which is included in Section C of the Board Book. There is no order among these priorities; they are all equally important. Now the sad thing is they have all been endorsed with enthusiasm by the Executive Committee and the Executive Director, so I can't claim these as "my" priorities anymore.

The first is to try to make INFORMS as mission critical to full-time practitioners as it has been for many years to academics principally through our journals and our meetings. Some may wonder "Why full-time practitioners?" Well, there are two motives. The first is the belief that a struggling practice will sooner or later bring down the whole profession. There are quite a few people who believe that is what is happening right now. For instance, the recent (within the last five years) problems that business schools are having can be traced to the difficulties of our practitioner brethren. There is clearly a very close connection between the practitioner side of the profession and the academic side of the profession. The second motive for this priority is that the practitioner segment is the only one for which there are very large numbers of potential members. Our market penetration in academia is pretty high ... we can only make marginal improvements there, and of course we want to do this. But we have enormous untapped membership potential in the practitioner segment. That's the first priority.

The second priority is to more fully exploit the Internet in general and the Web in particular for creating and delivering INFORMS products and services. This works for all members no matter what segment of the profession they are in. And it works by its very nature at home, at the office, and on the road. I like to use the expression "webification of INFORMS". That is basically what is happening. I will have more to say about that later. There are great opportunities for new and improved on-line products and services, and also some very substantial opportunities for cost reduction or at least doing the new things in a more efficient way costwise than we could have done before.

The third top priority is what I call "putting the whole team on the field," which basically means to make the most of both the volunteer and the staff organizations that we have here in partnership with one another. I will have a good deal to say about that in a few minutes.
 

RADAR SCREEN

I've composed a two-pager that I call my "radar screen", which is also in Section C of the Board Book, to show that I'm really serious about these top priorities and also to shamelessly promote my favorite ideas.

It's a checklist in support of the three priorities. I keep a file on each of these things, and I try to keep them moving, but in most cases the prime movers are other people; I am just the cheerleader and coordinator. I have listed in parentheses the committees and the people who are really doing the work and moving these things forward. Now, every time you see a committee listed you should also think of the Board Liaison; the Board Liaison is a critical person for all committees, and I'll have more to say about that later.

Part I corresponds to the first top priority. I've said so much about the Shared Destiny Initiatives on previous occasions that I'm going to fulfill your silent prayers by saying nothing about them today. Well, maybe just two short remarks.

The first is that eight of these initiatives have been generalized to the whole membership. They are no longer special to full-time practitioners. I took the liberty of including those in the other parts of the outline wherever they fit. The second point is that in my section of the Board Book you have the very latest version of the Shared Destiny document for your bedtime reading. You'll notice that progress is being made on many fronts.

Part II corresponds to the second top priority. This is most evident in IOL (INFORMS Online) right now, but as time goes on it's going to be evident in more and more places.

There are three keys to the webification of INFORMS. The first is IOL under the very able editorship of Mike Trick, with whom I was fortunate to spend the better part of this last Thursday. He has a fine set of Associate Editors. There is so much to do that within the next few months we hope to double the number of Associate Editors. The second key is building core competency in information technology in both INFORMS offices. The big step we took there is having Ed Thrush join us as our first-ever Manager of Information Systems. The third key is our Vice President of Information Technology, Christine Bullen, and her Information Technology Committee to strategize, guide a lot if not most of this, and then, of course, do whatever else needs to be done.

Part III corresponds to the third top priority: putting the whole team on the field. I'll go through this in some detail because many of these items impact all of you.

Board Liaisons for Committees We have 38 standing committees, 8 standing subcommittees and a task force or two. Each of these can do great things if they have three ingredients: leadership, energy and direction. And each of these has a liaison to the Board; 14 of the 20 Board Members serve as Board Liaisons. Of the 46 standing committees and subcommittees, 34 are not chaired by a Board Member. These are the ones that we are concerned about, since their chairs don't sit on the Board. Their success depends strongly on their Board Liaisons' ability to integrate them into the total organizational structure.

Therefore, the Executive Committee has expanded the role of the Board Liaisons to stress the nurturing of their committees: we want them to nurture their committees proactively. What does that mean? We have tried to spell this out in a rewritten Section 4.5 of the Policies and Procedures Manual. You all received the brand new edition recently, so you can check the new language for Board Liaison responsibilities. I put that language in all of my appointment letters to committee chairs so that committee chairs know what to expect of their Board Liaisons. I also put it in my appointment letter to all Board Liaisons themselves.

In addition, the Executive Committee is taking another step this year to make it easier for Board Liaisons to play their nurturing role. We're going to cycle through the Board Liaisons on a regular basis in our bi-weekly conference calls. We've been meeting once every other week for about an hour and a half, and from now on we're going to be inviting one of the Board Liaisons to sit in with us. We'll do what we can to understand their committees better and how the Executive Committee and others might be able to help.

Board Meeting Redesign Some of you may have noticed a change in the design of this meeting. I want to make it clear that the overriding purpose is to recognize the crucially important partnership between staff and volunteers. I'll mention three of the most obvious changes.

There is now a seating plan and place cards. These are not arranged at random; Randy and I worked it out. We tried to put Department heads next to their Board counterpart wherever that made sense, and there were a few other considerations. I appreciate your cooperation with our plan, but I would also say that if anyone has a reason to move, that's just fine.

Another change is the private interviews that the Executive Committee members had with Department heads this morning. We thought they were very valuable, and I hope that we'll be able to continue them at least at the interim meetings.

Also, there were "partner meetings" earlier today between volunteer and staff counterparts. I hope you all found this useful. Let me make a request: before the end of the day or before you leave, please scribble on a piece of paper any comments or suggestions you might have for improving the design of partner meetings in the future and give them to me, Lisa, or Randy. If you think this is a good thing to continue doing, we'll try to do it in the future.

You may also have noticed some changes in the design of the agenda. I'll mention three of these here. One is that the agenda itself is now a very simple model of INFORMS; if you know the INFORMS organization you know the agenda. There is a logic to it. Every Board Member, every committee, and every subcommittee has an agenda line now in some logical place whether or not there is a report. This makes the agenda easier to follow, easier to navigate, and will keep us from forgetting the parts of INFORMS that happen not to be reporting. Another change is that every Department head is now invited to give their own report right after their natural Board partner. This is another aspect of the partnership theme I spoke of between the volunteers and the staff organization. Finally, you may notice the Action Items listed on the agenda. These are from the last meeting. The idea is that by getting them on the agenda we can make sure that they don't fall through the cracks. I hope that they will all be dispensed with as a by-product of the discussion before we get to them, but if not then I or someone will ask for clarification of their status.

Committee Chairs and Committee Members For the last several months, finding the right committee chairs and members has been almost a daily labor. They are the arms and legs of the Board. It is tremendously important to us that they have good leadership, plenty of energy, and good direction. That is one of the things that the Executive Committee will continue to work on all year long. The veterans among you who are committee chairs probably were surprised to receive a four-page customized letter instead of the brief traditional one. I hope you will forgive me for that. If you want to retaliate, then I invite you to do so by submitting long, detailed reports to the Board.

Division Directors We have 106 subdivisions: 2 societies, 4 fora, 26 sections, 29 regular chapters, and 45 student chapters. This is the grassroots of INFORMS and most of its vitality. If the subdivisions thrive then INFORMS thrives. It's basically as simple as that. Vicki's message has finally gotten through, and I thank her for preaching it for the last two years.

To run this empire we have five Division Directors who are essentially group Vice Presidents. I was amazed to see that their duties were never written down in the Policies and Procedures Manual. Just informal understandings. So we wrote down a set of responsibilities, submitted them to the Executive Committee for approval, and you can see the result in Section 15.7 of the new edition of the P&P Manual.

The intent is to make the duties of Division Directors parallel to those of the Board Liaisons, although some differences are necessary. The aspect I would most like to emphasize is the proactive nurturing of subdivisions. Subdivisions aren't things that happen or don't happen in isolation; they are an integral part of INFORMS and the Division Directors need to proactively nurture them. The Executive Committee will cycle through the Directors on its conference calls along with Board Liaisons, and we will do the best we can to facilitate this proactivity.

External Liaisons I'll leave this one to Bob Armacost to deal with during his report.

Innovation Priority-Sharing There are two premises here. One is the belief that INFORMS needs to evolve rapidly. If we don't adapt and evolve in times like these we can't be all that we can be; we'll see stagnant and shrinking membership, meeting attendance, and journal subscriptions. So we have to do a lot of innovation. The second premise is that innovation is everybody's job. It isn't just the Executive Committee's job or a Board Member's job or a Department head's job, it's everybody's job ... everyone who is an INFORMS staff member or volunteer.

So I asked every committee and subcommittee chair, and Randy asked every Department head, to offer their innovation priorities for 1997 on a voluntary basis. We got quite a lot of them: all of the Department heads and quite a few of the committee chairs responded. We will be hearing all of these innovation priorities today and tomorrow from the Board Liaisons and Department heads. I think that's going to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the meeting.

Office Hiring at Key Positions As you know, we have a new Manager of Information Systems, a new Director of Publication Services, we are very actively seeking a Director of Public Relations, and we have added a couple of folks in Member Services recently. We're not complete as an organization without people in these key positions.

Some of us have ambitions for additional people. We need more people to do all of the exciting things we are talking about, but we do have a bottom line to worry about. So we'll have to look for more volunteers to help do some of these things. Which brings me to another request: Would you please be on the lookout for folks who have not yet become active volunteers at INFORMS? Even if they're not members that's OK, we'll find a way to throw a team jacket on them and plug them into the appropriate piece of the organization. Tell me, or Randy, or anybody about them and we'll take it from there.

Policies And Procedures Manual This is the last item in Part III of my Radar Screen. It may not be your favorite bedtime reading, but I believe this is one of the most important documents in all of INFORMS. It's one of the main parts of our organizational memory, and that's important when you have a churning volunteer organization as we have. It needs to be a living document, which means it has to stay in step with practice and should distill the best practices and best thinking of each generation of volunteers. Volunteers should leave their best ideas and ways of doing things behind.

A lot of corrections and improvements have been made in the P&P Manual during the last six months or so, including extensive revision of the committee pages and the responsibilities of the Board Liaisons and Division Directors (as I mentioned earlier). But even the greatest one-time fix is not going to last very long. We have to think about perpetual updates. I'm shooting for updates twice a year. In February when most people are early in their terms, Board Members and committee chairs should read their part of the P&P to see exactly what they are supposed to do and suggest improvements with a fresh eye. Then in November, when they are seasoned veterans, these same people can see better what needs to be improved and suggest revisions accordingly.

So please look at your relevant pages of the P&P and give Susan Albin your suggestions as to how to improve it in specific language by the end of February.

That finishes my walk through Part III of my Radar Screen.

Part IV contains more initiatives that don't fit naturally elsewhere, although 5 items are actually general versions of what were Shared Destiny Initiatives. I can just barely stifle myself from discussing these, but we need to move on.

Are there any questions before I do?

The president proceeded to the remainder of his report, not transcribed herein.