Content area
Full text
THE BEGINNING
One afternoon in the fall of 1949, I was sitting at my desk in the Manville, New Jersey, building products plant of the Johns Manville Corporation, where I worked as a financial analyst studying the financial and business aspects of various manufacturing operations at the plant, when the phone rang. It was a person named Harry B. Wissman calling from Arthur D. Little, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite having spent nearly two years across the river at the Harvard Business School, I had never heard of Arthur D. Little. Harry Wissman asked me to meet him for dinner to learn about a new activity Arthur D. Little was about to launch and to discuss a possible mutual interest in coming to work in it. Harry Wissman had come across my resume at the Harvard Business School and thought I might fit in usefully as a junior staff member.
Several members of the Arthur D. Little staff had taken leave for government service during World War II and some had worked in, or had become acquainted with, the military operations research groups. They felt there might be a role for a counterpart activity at Little, as an element of its young and growing management consulting practice. (Until shortly before WWII, Arthur D. Little, Inc. was primarily a technical contract research, development, and engineering firm, although its technical skills were being drawn on increasingly to advise governments, investors, and business firms on the economic development and business implications of new technology.) They convinced Raymond Stevens, a senior officer of Arthur D. Little, to support an experiment to test the possibilities of operations research in industry. He, in turn, asked Harry Wissman, as part of his work, to take on the task of building an operations research activity, and persuaded Theodore Houser, the top merchandising officer of Sears, Roebuck & Co., for whom Little had done some superb technical work, to become a client to test the new activity.
I met with some of the Little staff, read a recently declassified Navy publication, which Harry Wissman lent me, Methods of Operations Research by Philip Morse and George Kimball, and spent a day in Cambridge being interviewed by Mr. Stevens and others. At the end of...