by Brooks Mendell | Dec 7, 2022 | Communication Skills, Writing
You wake at 5:40 in the morning to write for an hour before the family circus starts. Several ideas fight for space in your head, eating your limited time. Finally, you pick one and plow ahead. Here, I focus on how to quickly produce an editable and operable blog post...
by Brooks Mendell | Nov 9, 2022 | Communication Skills, Leading/Managing, Sports
Recently, I attended the visitation in Reading, Massachusetts for Francis O’Brien, my college baseball coach at MIT.[1]In his eulogy, Kevin, the oldest of Coach O’Brien’s five children, said, “As Jackie Robinson said, ‘A life is not important except in the impact...
by Brooks Mendell | Oct 10, 2022 | Communication Skills, Forestry, Leading/Managing, Learning
When I missed the mark in my role as a log buyer and harvest manager in northeast Georgia in the 1990s, Danny Hamsley had a way of setting me straight. It would start with a phone call. “Brooks, I’m riding with you in the woods tomorrow.” Early...
by Brooks Mendell | Sep 20, 2022 | Communication Skills
I’ve given a lot of presentations, mostly about forest finance, timber markets and communication skills. When preparing, I use current data and recent research overlaid onto basic “themes.” Then I practice with new stories or examples. Even though I may be fluent and...
by Brooks Mendell | Aug 21, 2022 | Learning, Thinking/Analysis
We share the brain of our ancestors. The humans of one hundred thousand years ago, as they started migrating from Africa, toted between their ears brains similar to the ones we carry today.[1] The average homo sapiens on the street, with a comparable mental engine to...