As a graduating student in this field of "industrial_engineer/computer_scientist/mathematician/statistician/economist" I found this story and the rest of the site (not the front page picture) fairly inspiring. There are no role models even with the decent amount of blogging the OR/MS community does. They are still stuffy academicians, perhaps so because they could not find role models in industry either.
If you want an excellent OR role model, I suggest you check out Gene Woolsey. He has a book that is a collection of stories of real world OR, not just solving traveling salesmen problems: http://www.lionhrtpub.com/books/wp1.html He's an excellent example of a non-stuffy academic that focuses on applying OR to the real world.
Thanks for that link. It also did remind me of one Australian company [http://www.biarri.com/about_the_team.shtml] that I explore from time to time. They seem to offer the most types of OR decision support for business, even with SaaS delivery.
