Community

Gary Lilien
AMA Irwin/McGraw Hill Educator of the Year Speech,
16 February 2008

            It is truly an honor to be here today, as recipient of this award.  It is humbling considering the great marketing educators who have been honored previously.  It is even more humbling when I look around here and note some of those who have not yet been so honored.

            It is also a bit disconcerting as I feel like I may be here under false pretenses.  You see, I am not really a marketer.   My educational background is all in engineering and operations research and I have never taken a marketing course or, indeed, any course in a business school.  So, how did I get here?  As Geoffrey Rush said often in Shakespeare in Love….it is mystery…or at least a happy accident in my case. 

            The late 1960's, when I entered a PhD program at Columbia's Engineering School, were strange times.  We were in the midst of student protests over the Vietnam war and the draft and there was turmoil on University campuses everywhere.   In March of 1968, I successfully lobbied to turn a summer job offer at Mobil's Computer Systems and Management Sciences Department into a full time position after I learned that I was both likely to be drafted and that Mobil had a perfect record for getting draft deferments for its employees.  I never knew I was so critical to the Vietnam war effort until I read the letter that Mobil wrote to my local draft board.   And happily Mobil was willing to support my (part time) doctoral studies. 

            Mobil was an ideal training ground for someone like me, interested in real Operations Research—developing  systematic approaches for solving actual business problems.  What a fabulous work environment that was…my group manager, Rudolph Reinitz, received his PhD under John Little when John was at Case Western.  Rudy retained John as a regular consultant at Mobil and I got to know John there.   My direct supervisor,  Ambar Rao, had recently gotten his PhD with Russ Ackoff at Wharton and Russ was another consultant I got to know at Mobil. 

             As a side benefit, I was able to publish six articles in A level journals based on the projects I worked on at Mobil.   And I was keen to find a problem at Mobil that would serve as my dissertation.  I initially planned to work on a math programming problem involving the optimal deployment of oil spill pollution clean up resources, but that project never got off the ground.  Had it, no doubt my career would have been quite different.

            One of my internal Mobil clients was the Market Research department.   They had run an advertising experiment and following an aggressive heavy-up test, could not find any effect of advertising on a diary panel of gasoline consumers.  So, since I had learned consumer diary panel analysis at a summer job I had a few years earlier at Lever Brothers, they asked me to have a look.  What I found was that the ad experiment had taken place during a gasoline price war. 

            After a bit of investigation I discovered three things:  First, no one had yet studied and modeled the effect of price variation on individual brand switching, so I had a unique data set; Second, the data and, possibly, the model I had in mind might provide the basis for a dissertation; and Third, one of the world's experts on stochastic models of buyer behavior, a fellow named Donald Morrison, was a Professor at Columbia—although in the Business School, not in the Engineering School.  Well, I invited Don to lunch at Mobil's expense, gave him a page and a half outline of my idea for a dissertation, and asked him what he thought.  He said he thought the idea had some merit.  I asked him if he would supervise my dissertation…he said he would.

            I think I met Don six times for an hour or two each during the following eight months before I defended my dissertation.  So I suppose Don would agree that I was probably not his highest maintenance doctoral student.  But Don gave me gems of feedback that were invaluable…for example, when I asked him if he wanted me to work on Chapter 2 first—my proposed literature review—he said no, and suggested that I do that last, as it would likely narrow my thinking and dampen my creativity.  He recommended that I carefully scan the literature only after I had thought deeply about the problem and had done my best to attack it on my own.   That advice—focusing more on deep thought and creativity than heavy referencing—is one I have tried to pass on.

            Anyway, I defended my dissertation and turned 26 (past draft age) at about the same time, so I had a choice—I could have stayed in a secure, high paying job at Mobil or tried my hand in academia.   I decided to take a chance with the latter and chatted with Don, asking him what engineering schools he would recommend. 

            Don told me that a few business schools like his alma mater, MIT, would actually fit me better than an engineering school.  He then arranged two campus interviews for me.  One school was just not right for me, but the fit at MIT seemed good (even if the salary was half of what I was getting at Mobil).  (By the way, Don is a former winner of this award and told me that he and I join the late Frank Bass and Frank's PhD student Don Lehmann as the only Advisor-Advisee pairs to have won to date.  Don keeps careful track of all such trivia concerning his PhD students—and I think he gets more pleasure from their accomplishments than from his own).

            Anyway, back to my offer from MIT.  My late father, who owned a printing shop and was a practical man, found this choice of job curious.  "Have you ever taught?," he asked.  No I said.  "And this MIT Sloan School—isn't that a business school and aren't you an engineer?"  Yes I said.  "And they want you to teach what?  Marketing?" he asked.  "That's right, dad".  "Well," he concluded, "this marketing field must have really low entry barriers."

            So I am in marketing, and here today, First because of the Vietnam War and the draft, Second because a math programming project at Mobil on oil spill pollution cleanup got shelved, Third, because an MIT grad, Don Morrison happened to be in the Business School at my University and Finally, because our field, fortunately, is quite inclusive and actually DOES have low entry barriers.

            When I got to MIT I was put in an office next to John Little….I think John felt he needed to keep an eye on me.  While I was at Mobil, important and interesting problems regularly emerged from internal client requests.  I was at MIT for a few weeks and no one brought me any interesting problems, so I went next door and asked John what to do.  "Now you are in academia", he said, "so you have to make them up."  "How do I do that?" I inquired.  "Ask important questions"  he replied.

            I took John's advice and scanned our field.  I noted that almost all the top academic research  (including my dissertation work) focused on the half of marketing that we now refer to as BtoC, with a miniscule amount focusing on the other half, the BtoB half.   The reasons were pretty clear---lack of data, few, less publically visible transactions (although each of much higher dollar volume), longer purchase cycles, huge customer heterogeneity, much greater power on the buyer side of the dyad, complex purchasing processes,  and the like. 

            It seemed that tackling the important BtoB problems there might require different concepts and approaches.   As if to confirm this observation about the neglect of BtoB, I noted that MIT, an "institute of technology," had never, by the time I reached there in the early 1970's, offered an MBA elective in BtoB (then, Industrial) Marketing.  Anyway, I developed and offered the first such course at MIT and also began a program of research in the area.

            The second thing that I noted in my scan of the field was that most of what passed for "marketing science" or marketing analytics at most business schools other than at a few like MIT and Wharton, perhaps, was stylized analytic elegance, far removed from actual business problems.  My engineering, OR training and my start in the field at Mobil made problem-driven  or "vaguely right rather than precisely wrong" as Len Lodish put it, seem to be an under-appreciated approach.    Hence, the other passion of my career, marketing engineering, took root. 

            So in the late 1970's while I was still at MIT and teaching a marketing models PhD course, I decided that a text with a more decision-oriented framework was needed.   I had just written my first book, so I had a pretty good idea what the challenges were.    As luck would have it, I got a call from Phil Kotler, whose stature in our field is only exceeded by his grace and humility.  He said that he thought that his 1971 book Marketing Decision Making: A Model Building Approach, was out of date and asked if I would be willing to take the lead on a major revision, work he did not have time for.   Kotler and Lilien, I thought---what an opportunity!

            That revision turned out to be even more work than I anticipated, and Phil, true to his word, really had little time to do much more than critique.   I was fine with that, and as we were about to go to press I got another call from Phil, this time suggesting that, in light of my major contributions to the revision, Lilien and Kotler would be a more appropriate order of authorship than Kotler and Lilien.  I was stunned…..and grateful.  First authorship meant so much more to me and my career at that time than to Phil.  I learned an important lesson that day, and have tried to apply it, especially with PhD students and junior colleagues.  (My senior colleagues can fend for themselves).

            While at MIT in 1980 I got a call from Paul Rigby,  Associate Dean at Penn State's Business School, telling me that I had been nominated for a position there.  As a native New Yorker who viewed Boston as a small town, I had no idea where Penn State was.  State College is actually the name of a town, I asked…and where is that exactly?  I supposed it was somewhere in the Midwest, surrounded by corn and cows-- and I told Paul I had no interest. Paul, though low key, can be very persuasive, and he convinced me to visit.

             While there, the Search Committee asked me what I would do if I had a position called Research Professor that had no required teaching, my own administrative assistant, my own budget to support myself and my students, and reporting responsibilities outside departments and directly to the dean.   This I had to think about.   After some reflection, I told them that, aside from catching up on my sleep, I would try to build some sort of institution that facilitated research and interaction between academics and practitioners in the BtoB domain.

            I had had prior success engaging multiple firms in collaborative research in the industrial marketing area with my Advisor studies at MIT, so I had some credibility, and they made me an offer I couldn't refuse.   As luck would have it, Irv Gross, (another graduate from John Little's OR group at Case) and now director of Marketing Research at DuPont, had a similar idea. 

            So it seemed that with Irv's collaboration, Penn State, with its Research Professor position and with Dave Wilson firmly implanted as a senior BtoB scholar there, would be an ideal place to execute such a plan.   So I decided to leave MIT and join Penn State--it IS in the middle of nowhere, but a very pleasant nowhere indeed--and we formally founded the ISBM 25 years ago, in 1983. 

            Irv retired as ISBM Executive Director in 1996, but not before he was able to locate Ralph Oliva, then Senior VP at Texas Instruments, as his more than able successor.  Ralph has been a colleague, mentor and close friend, and has brought the ISBM to the position that Irv, Dave and I envisioned when we founded it.  Ralph, whom I love, is fond of saying he has the same relationship with me (through the ISBM) that he has with his wife, Kat: he brings in the money and I spend it.  Works for me—thanks Ralph!

            By the early 1990's, the ISBM had become well established and I was considering what else to focus on when another opportunity emerged.  It seems that Arvind Rangaswamy, whose excellent work on applied marketing analytics I knew well, was looking for a new position and considering Penn State.  I worked like Penn State's football coach Joe Paterno works on recruits, to try to get Arvind to come, and we discussed what we might do together.   I was delighted to find that we had almost identical visions—that  texts like Marketing Models were simply inaccessible for the mass of marketing managers who needed to make business decisions—that much more was needed, especially in the software and related teaching materials domain.  That began our now 15 year collaboration on Marketing Engineering—more an obsession or passion than a project--and it binds us the way children bind parents.   In those 15 years of close work, we have had disagreements but have never had an argument.   Arvind combines breadth of skill and knowledge and hard work with an amazingly even temperament, and I could not ask for a better colleague or closer friend.

            I've droned on for quite some time now…. I am incredibly grateful to all those who have helped make my time in this profession both rewarding and fun.  I'd like to thank Ruth Bolton and the Award committee for their work and for the honor and David Hughes and his colleagues at McGraw-Hill/Irwin who have helped make this award possible.

            I've already mentioned Don Morrison, John Little, Irv Gross, Dave Wilson, Paul Rigby, Phil Kotler, Arvind Rangaswamy and Ralph Oliva.  I'd also like to thank my other colleagues at Penn State, especially Ujwal Kayande who, along with his wife Yoshita, made a special trip to share this time with me, and Raj Grewal, who is doing a marvelous job as Associate Research Director of the ISBM.

            I have been blessed by having had wonderful PhD students, from my first, Jean-Marie Choffray to my last, Girish Mallapragada and including among others Arnaud De Bruyn, Rajiv Sinha, Shlomo Kalish, Stephane Gauvin,  Liz Wilson, Lauren Wright, Jianan Wu, Eunsang Yoon and Christophe Van den Bulte.

              And I owe special thanks to another PhD student,  Raji Srinivasan,  whose energy and enthusiasm is unparalleled,  and who I am sure kept badgering the AMA about giving me this award until they finally gave in…. and here we are.

            I have thanked those involved in the second most important aspect of my life—my profession.   Those who know me, know my family comes first, at least at this point in my life.  My wife Dorothy and my daughter Amy never let me forget that this was not the case in the early years.  I am so very happy that they are here, along with my wonderful son in law, Glenn (the videographer) and my perfect granddaughter Alanna.  I have had and continue to have a great time working (if that is what they call it) in this profession and I am very fortunate that they could be here to share this time with me.

            Let me close with a reflection on one other interaction with John Little, this time in 1981, I believe.  John was Chair of the INFORMS (then TIMS and ORSA)  publication committee, and offered me the job as the second editor in chief of Interfaces.   Contemplating my first Editor In Chief opportunity, I expressed concern about publishing less than stellar material in the journal.  John commented that an editor is remembered for the best stuff published on his watch and the lesser stuff is forgotten anyway.  I think life is a lot like that…at least I hope so…because I see quite a bit of lesser stuff that has occurred on my watch , but I do see a few things that I actually think are pretty good.

            Thanks again for this wonderful honor and do enjoy the rest of the conference.