Steve Sashihara

President and CEO Princeton Consultants

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Steve Sashihara is President and Chief Executive Officer of Princeton Consultants, a management and technology consulting firm he established in 1981, the year after taking his degree at Princeton University, and has led continuously for more than four decades. The firm’s distinguishing characteristic is that it sits at the junction of two disciplines that are usually kept apart: mathematical optimisation and operations research on one side, and management consulting and custom software development on the other. Sashihara’s argument, which he set out at book length in The Optimization Edge in 2011, is that most organisations leave substantial value unrealised because they treat resource allocation as a matter of judgement rather than as a solvable mathematical problem. The firm’s work with the United States Census Bureau on the 2020 Census earned him recognition as an INFORMS Franz Edelman Laureate in 2022, the most prominent award in applied operations research.

Career Highlights

• Established Princeton Consultants in 1981 and has served as its President and CEO throughout, a tenure of more than forty years.
• Named an INFORMS Franz Edelman Laureate in 2022 for work with the United States Census Bureau optimising 2020 Census operations.
• Wrote The Optimization Edge, published by McGraw-Hill in 2011, explaining mathematical optimisation to a business audience.
• Serves as a director of the Association of Management Consulting Firms and as an officer of the INFORMS Roundtable.
• Writes for The European Financial Review and M World, and speaks regularly at AMCF, INFORMS and IBM events on artificial intelligence, optimisation and digital disruption.
• Works personally on client engagements as technologist, strategist, system architect and project director rather than solely as a firm principal.

Professional Journey

Sashihara graduated from Princeton University in 1980 with an A.B. in philosophy. He did not take a job afterwards; he started a firm. Princeton Consultants was established in 1981 and he has run it ever since, which makes his career unusual in consulting, a field where leadership typically rotates and founders typically exit.

The firm’s practice grew around a specific conviction. Sashihara focuses on optimisation in its technical sense, the use of mathematics, algorithms and operations research to allocate constrained resources, and he has spent his career translating that discipline for executives who make allocation decisions without it. Princeton Consultants combines this with software development and conventional management consulting, so that a recommendation arrives as a working system rather than as a report. In more recent years artificial intelligence has been folded into the same practice.

In 2011 McGraw-Hill published The Optimization Edge, in which Sashihara set out the case for optimisation in non-technical language, arguing that companies can extract materially more value from assets they already hold. The book consolidated his position as an advocate for the field outside its academic and practitioner core, and he has continued that advocacy through articles in The European Financial Review and M World and through frequent appearances at Association of Management Consulting Firms, INFORMS and IBM events. He serves as a director of the AMCF and as an officer of the INFORMS Roundtable.

The firm’s most visible engagement was with the United States Census Bureau, where Princeton Consultants worked on optimising operations for the 2020 decennial census, a logistics and scheduling problem of national scale. INFORMS recognised the work in 2022 by naming Sashihara a Franz Edelman Laureate, the field’s principal award for demonstrated real-world impact from operations research.

Education

Princeton University

Bachelor of Arts (A.B.), Philosophy, 1980