by Brooks Mendell | Jun 14, 2020 | Communication Skills, Leading/Managing, Thinking/Analysis
In my roles as a business advisor and as a team leader, I have the opportunity to continually discuss and test ideas on managing and making decisions, especially in turbulent times. The intensity and urgency of these conversations increased with the arrival in 2020 of...
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 | Nov 7, 2017 | Learning, Thinking/Analysis
Quarterly financial statements and annual company reports are the language of investors and executives. At the end of the day, the results of managerial business and capital allocation decisions get translated through audited financial statements, which, like haikus...
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...
