By Web Communications
This post was written by Randy Horick.
Michael Lapré
It’s probably fair to claim that Michael Lapré is the only professor at a leading U.S. business school who is both a veteran of the Dutch Navy and the coach of a national champion Double Dutch jump rope team. As you might imagine, how he achieved that distinction is a story involving numerous twists and turns.
The first turn came as Lapré’s service in the naval forces of his native country was ending. Drawing on his undergraduate education, Lapré became an operations research officer in the Royal Netherlands Navy. When the time came to transition into a civilian career, “I wanted to become a management trainee,” he recalls. “But the economy was bad.”
Fortuitously, Lapré received an opportunity from a professor at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading business schools, to become a research associate. He went on to earn his doctorate there, then taught for four years at Boston University before arriving at Vanderbilt, where he eventually became the E. Bronson Ingram Research Professor of Operations Management.
Since then, Lapré has built an international reputation in operations management, especially in the area of organizational learning curves. “There is a lot of variation,” he says. “Some organizations learn fast, others learn slowly, and some not at all. What drives that variability is what interests me.”
Lapré has examined industries ranging from steel-cord manufacturing to airlines to healthcare. Returning to one of the most productive areas of his research, he co-authored a longitudinal study in 2018 that found that operational performance —including significant failures in customer service — was a useful predictor of future earnings distress among U.S. airlines.
Over time, Lapré’s areas of focus have become even more diverse — and more closely aligned with his personal interests. After reading research about learning patterns among orthopedic surgeons, Lapré undertook a forthcoming study examining what he calls “the chemistry of a surgery”: whether maintaining stable operating teams improved performance in orthopedic surgical procedures. “What we’re finding,” he says, “is that not necessarily every person on the team has to work together often (to optimize results).” What makes a positive difference, he adds, is matching surgeons with the same physician assistant and scrub tech.
But orthopedic surgeries, as Lapré points out, are not competitive events, and success is the norm. What about environments where the opposite is true? That question led him to study teams in Formula One racing — a sport he has followed since his youth. That research falls within a field that Lapré regards as “a fresh challenge” — sports analytics — which for him is both a scholarly and a teaching interest.
A course for Vanderbilt MBA students in that subject made sense, he says. Yale, Columbia, and INSEAD all offer electives in Sports Analytics. More importantly, Lapré argues, his course is highly practical: “We teach students quite a few advanced quantitative tools, but they don’t have enough opportunities to practice them. (Sports Analytics) is like a quantitative capstone experience. It gives students further exposure to tools they can use in any business context.”
In a roundabout way, Lapré even brought his analytical approach to the sport whose name derives from his country of origin. He volunteered to coach his daughter’s Double Dutch jump rope team. He noticed that, on tricks such as the “quadruple under,” in which the two ropes rapidly pass four times under the jumper, altering the distance between the turners affected the team’s performance.
“I realized it was an optimization problem, and I’ve done optimization for a long time,” he says. “So in my own way I started to do sports analytics in Double Dutch.”
How much Lapré’s analysis helped optimize the team may be impossible to pinpoint. But their record is unambiguous: In 2018, they became the Grand National Champions in Double Dutch.
