Education

Client education is a big part of what we do. Training is targeted toward three possible client roles: consumer, contributor, and producer.

For executives, we introduce them to what decision analysis is, how to use, and why they need it. We show them why, for example, executives at companies like Chevron, Boeing, Genentech, and Proctor & Gamble require a decision analysis for all major projects and products.

We also train staff to be contributors, so they learn to think probabilistically and dynamically about the issues they face and programs they manage. This equips them to supply the high quality inputs needed for analysis.

Lastly, we train and mentor internal staff to create and lead analysis on their own. Our goal here is to equip clients to handle the routine stuff on their own and possibly call us for the make-or-break issues.

In these roles, we bring decades of experience in teaching decision analysis. Our textbook, Decision Analysis for the Professional, was first published in 1986 and is presently in its fourth edition. We lecture on decision analysis at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. We are on faculty at the Stanford Center for Professional Development, the Academy of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, the American Course on Drug Development & Regulatory Sciences, and the Stanford Summer Institutes. In the latter, we teach decision leadership and negotiation to gifted high school students from around the world.

Whatever your training and education goals are, we can get you there.

A Commitment to Client Education

We're committed to educating our clients to make them effective users and producers of the kind of work we do. We have long experience training clients directly in private courses, and through course offerings at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive education levels at Stanford University. We even teach in the Stanford Summer Institutes for gifted high school students from around the world. 

The ACDRS

As Faculty for the American Course on Drug Development and Regulatory Sciences, we teach professionals from pharma and biotech companies large and small the nuts and bolts of evaluating projects and managing development portfolios. We show how to make effective decisions considering all the risks: in the lab, in clinical trials, at regulatory approval, in manufacturing, and in the marketplace. It all adds up to better decisions and better allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars. 

 

The ASHRM Academy

As Faculty at the ASHRM Academy, we teach healthcare professionals better risk management and enterprise risk management (ERM), empowering them to become better risk managers and to support strategic decisions for senior leadership. 

A Library of Resources

To help spread the word on Decision Analysis, we publish regularly on theory and applications. Our textbook Decision Analysis was first published in 1986, is now in its fourth edition, and is available for free under a Creative Commons license in the Library section of this web site, along with a selection of published articles from peer-reviewed journals.