by Brooks Mendell | May 19, 2021 | Communication Skills, Forestry
The late Dr. Alex Shigo, author of accessible books on trees and former Chief Scientist of the U.S. Forest Service, described trees thusly: “Trees are superior survival organisms. They live longer, grow taller, and become more massive than any organism ever...
by Brooks Mendell | Aug 25, 2020 | Forestry, Thinking/Analysis
This post introduces a recent essay on the danger of using averages for making decisions or evaluating performance. Mathematically, the average tells us the arithmetic mean; it gives a sense for where the middle lies within a group or between extremes. But...
by Brooks Mendell | Mar 18, 2020 | Communication Skills, Forestry, Learning, Thinking/Analysis
“Without a structured approach to ordering the world, the world will impose its views on us. The fact is some things are more important than others, some things are easily verifiable…Simple processes help us sort the mess and prioritize.” from “Managing Risk by...
by Brooks Mendell | May 19, 2019 | Forestry, Learning, Thinking/Analysis
My work as a researcher in forestry sometimes highlights ideas relevant to developing plans or managing risk in other industries. For example, it helps to have a simple screening and ranking process. Without a structured approach to ordering the world, the world...
by Brooks Mendell | Oct 21, 2017 | Forestry, Thinking/Analysis
Professor Richard Thaler won this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics, in part, for research confirming that we (humans) believe we are smarter and more rational than we actually are. Asked how he plans to spend the $1.1 million prize money, Thaler replied, “I will try...
by Brooks Mendell | Mar 8, 2017 | Forestry, Thinking/Analysis
In 1990, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman and two colleagues published a study documenting how we can “overvalue” things we already own (D. Kahneman, J. Knetsch and R. Thaler, “Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem,” The Journal...
