I am not a born academic. I deliberately joined the ranks of academia at a fairly late stage as a natural progression from my professional career as an executive in what in those days was known as "decision support." My career had begun in the telecom industry before the days of deregulation in what one would call strategic planning and then I moved on to decision support in the field of banking, developing trading room software and risk management systems. As I developed decision support systems for real applications, the more I realized how very dependent these systems are on decision...