February 2005

White House Honors Operations Researcher

Erica Plambeck studies factories, manufacturing processes, and the supply chains that support them. One of her recent papers ponders when it is smart to sell the manufacturing plant and outsource an operation.

She is also a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers presented last September in a White House ceremony. The award is the highest honor from the U.S. government for young researchers. It recognizes “extraordinary achievements of young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers.” Plambeck, an associate professor of operations, information, and technology, was among 57 researchers nationwide and one of three from Stanford University to receive the award.

Plambeck has received a National Science Foundation grant of nearly half a million dollars over five years for her work on real-time supply chain management. She was among 12 women NSF grant recipients recognized by the Early Career Award. This represented the first time since the award was created in 1996 that the majority of NSF-nominated recipients were women.

Eight federal departments and agencies annually nominate young scientists and engineers whose work shows the greatest promise to benefit the nominating agency’s mission. Juan G. Santiago, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Ravi Vakil, assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford, both NSF nominees, were the two other Stanford faculty honored.

John H. Marburger III, science adviser to President George W. Bush and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, presented the awards at the White House ceremony.

Robert Burgelman, a respected faculty member who has shared his ideas with Business School alumni groups around the world, is the 2004 recipient of the Jaedicke Silver Apple Award, presented by the Stanford Business School Alumni Association.

“Paris, Denmark, Florence, India—you do have good taste in events to attend,” joked last year’s recipient, Rod Kramer, in presenting the award during Alumni Weekend activities in October. “Robert is a world-class teacher of the first rank. He has an energy, intensity, and focus that both intimidates and inspires. Like all good leaders in the classroom, he draws out the very best in his students, whether MBAs or executives. He pushes his students hard, but he does so with his terrific sense of humor, wonderful laugh, and trademark smile, which traverses the full width of his face.”

Burgelman, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management, is director of the Stanford Executive Program. An academic leader in the field of strategy, he is the author of several books, the most recent being Strategy Is Destiny (Free Press, 2002).

The Silver Apple Award, named for Dean Emeritus Robert K. Jaedicke, was created to recognize faculty members with significant involvement in alumni programs.

Like any major business, sports leagues and teams share a need for good strategy, effective leadership, and a solid business model, George Foster, the professor behind the Business School’s sports management classes, told an Alumni Weekend audience last October.

Foster compared the National Hockey League where 20 of 30 teams are losing money, and a strike is occurring this year to the National Football League, which hasn’t had a strike since the late 1980s and has teams bringing in an average of $160 million to $180 million of revenue annually. The NHL “has devastating problems—lack of strategy and lack of leadership, ” said Foster, the Paul L. and Phyllis Wattis Professor of Management.

Foster told the audience he has worked with several startups hungrily looking for the next customer. He finds teams, and especially stadiums, no different. “There is a paranoia about revenue growth that’s more extreme in the sports industry,” he said. The Washington Redskins, for example, recently added 500 seats to their stadium even though very few of them have actual views of the field (the team installed TVs for those fans).

Alumni to Know

Faculty

Newsmakers

The Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany has awarded its 2004 Prize in Labor Economics to Edward Lazear, the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics. Lazear received the $62,000 prize last October in Berlin.

Lazear “used price theory and incentive theory from economics to organize our understanding of how to mobilize human resources and incentives within firms,” said economist James Heckman, a University of Chicago Nobel laureate who worked with Lazear when he taught at Chicago. “He single-handedly founded the modern field of personnel economics. He revolutionized the teaching, the practice, and the understanding of personnel economics and the economics of human resources in companies.”

The founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, Lazear writes on labor markets, microeconomic theory, and issues involving worker compensation and effects on productivity. He began developing seminal ideas in personnel economics as he expanded his teaching from doctoral students to MBA students in the 1970s and 1980s at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. The future managers pressed for real-world applications of the theories and analysis in labor economics. “By being forced to teach this in a business school and by being a very imaginative economist, he could see there was a field here,” said Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker, a former colleague of Lazear’s at Chicago. “It’s marrying labor economics with organizational behavior.”

Michael Harrison studies how randomness affects business processes ranging from the valuation of financial derivatives to managing processing networks like telephone call centers. His work has been honored with the 2004 John von Neumann Theory Prize presented by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) to honor a body of work with lasting impact in operations research and the management science.

For more than 30 years, Harrison, the Business School’s Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, has developed and analyzed stochastic models related to business—that is, business processes in which randomness plays an important role. The citation accompanying the INFORMS award singled out his work for “profound contributions” to both “stochastic networks and mathematical finance.”

In accepting the award, Harrison acknowledged the role played by his co-authors, including both faculty colleagues and graduate students, in shaping his work over the years. He also credited the Business School for its ongoing support.

 “For the most part, my research has been supported by my school, not by outside funding agencies,” he said. “Through five deans and innumerable associate deans, that support has been unwavering. This is the way the institution works, not some special deal that I managed to negotiate. Three crucial factors in my research career have been the school’s stability, its commitment to developing junior faculty, and it scholarly orientation.”