Managerial relevance: The key to survival for OR/MS

OR/MS has come under increasing pressure within the MBA community to justify its place in the curriculum. Bucking this trend, Darden's first-year OR/MS course, ‘Quantitative analysis’, is routinely rated by students as one of the top courses in the required core of the MBA curriculum. We believe the course's success is due largely to its focus on managerial relevance, rather than operations research, management science, statistics, or any other methodological discipline, per se. By managerial relevance, we mean that our modules and individual classes have a decision-oriented focus, raise issues and address contexts pertinent to the informed business person, and integrate closely with functional courses like finance, marketing, and operations. We contend that managerial relevance depends less on the macro-level course design than on the details at the class- and module-design levels.