Blog

Have you been talking with your children about the new school year? Many schools are starting the year fully remote; some, including New York City’s public school system, are vowing to provide in-person learning; some colleges and universities are staggering their calendars and only allowing select classes of students or majors to return to in-person learning. Many schools and colleges...

Amid the long and difficult unfolding of the Covid-19 crisis, we are all getting a crash course in how uncomfortable it is to be ruled by uncertainty and scarcity. We took for granted the basic freedoms of our society and its abundance. No one thought life could shrink for all of us so quickly and so completely. We didn’t expect...

What do you do when everything becomes unknown? So much of our daily lives now seems to fall into the “unknown” category: Is it safe to go to work? Should you cancel your family plans for vacation? What about going out for a slice of pizza? Yes or no? Usually, we differentiate between big and small decisions but in today’s...

Around the world, high school seniors --and their parents--are receiving decisions about applications for early admission to college. Some of these emails will elicit joy, but many more will cause students anxiety. Students who don’t get into their ED school will now face making a big decision on a tight deadline: where do you apply now, and to how many...

A senior in high school in New York City, whom I’ll call Anna, wanted to go away to college but her mother, who had never been to college, didn’t want Anna to go away to school. Anna struggled with how to have this important conversation with her mom. How could she solve her problem by both convincing her mother to...

How may we improve our financial and investment decision-making? That’s the subject of my new book Investing In Financial Research, A Decision-Making System For Better Results, and the latest Problem Solved Podcast. In an interview conducted by Lakshmi Bhojraj, the Breazzano Family Executive Director of the Parker Center for Investment Research, I answered her questions -and those of the live…

Educational experts across the spectrum bemoan the state of U.S. high schools, yet no one can agree on how to make schools more effective. Many fixes have been proposed, and many solutions have been tried, with varying success. But what if there were a way to improve students’ learning that didn’t cost trillions of dollars, could be easily implemented in…

How do we build trust with other stakeholders when making decisions? It was a question that an official at the State Department asked me to address last month when she invited me to speak to a group of foreign counter-terrorism experts from around the world. The official came to me after reading about my book Problem Solved. She felt my…

What do you think of when you see the classic image of a group of people surrounding a blank whiteboard? Innovation? Idea generation? Problem-solving? While a blank canvas, or the universe of infinite possibilities, seems like a great way to solve a problem or make a complex decision, it might not be effective or efficient to explore all options. Most…

As the stock market has been taking a wild ride these past few weeks, I’ve been finishing up a new book, currently titled Investing In Financial Research: A Decision Making System For Better Results. It is scheduled to be published in the fall. It’s an updated general interest version of the textbook I wrote initially for my Columbia Business School…