I was pleasantly surprised when Professor Chaman Jain asked me to devote this column to my perspective on the evolution of the forecasting function over the past 25 years to commemorate the Journal of Business Forecasting’s 25th anniversary. I was mostly surprised, however, because I realized that my experience actually started earlier (30 years ago), in 1976 during my first industry job at a consulting firm, A.D. Little (ADL). This firm was unique because Robert G. (Bob) Brown walked the ADL halls before me and left behind a strong legacy that was passed on to me. He was the person in the late 1950s whom was largely responsible for bringing exponential smoothing and other smoothing forecasting methods to industry, especially for use in inventory management.