INFORMS Open Forum

We need your help in choosing the next book for the INFORMS Book Club. Have you read something recently that you think would be a good choice or is there a book that you've been looking forward to reading? Please post your recommendations (fiction or non-fiction). Once we've received your suggestions, I'll send out a poll so you can vote on the next book. Thank you!

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Jill Capello
Membership Associate
INFORMS
Catonsville MD
jcapello@informs.org
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Chip War, by Chris Miller (published 2022).  This is the book about the problem facing the country (supply chains).  It is a stunningly researched overview of the challenges of managing the supply chain for semiconductor chips.  The book covers the complex physics of making advanced chips, the financial perspective of creating an incredibly expensive process that allows these advanced technologies to be sold very cheaply, and finally the supply chain complexities.  There is a reason why so many chips need to be made by one or two suppliers (we need the economics of consolidation).  One piece of equipment (that performs the lithography for printing ultra small chips) has 452,000 different components.  This is a rare book that I read cover to cover.

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Warren Powell
Chief Innovation Officer, Optimal Dynamics
Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
http://www.castlelab.princeton.edu/
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Hi Jill,
  I am going to go old school in my book recommendation. It's been long out of print but available online. Gene Woolsey and Huntington Swanson's classic "Operations Research for Immediate Application: A Quick & Dirty Manual." Yes, the applications are little dated as are some of the approaches but the lessons for applied operations researchers remain particularly relevant as human behavior and predispositions are pretty constant.

-Murray 

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Murray Cote
Associate Professor
Texas A&M University
College Station TX
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Here is my suggestion.

In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies

by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. (2006)

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Andrew Acosta
Data Scientist
Milesius Capital Resources LLC
Chicago IL
andrew@acm.org
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