The Center for Forest Business was very fortunate to host its Fourth Annual “CEO Roundtable” recently. The event took place this past Thursday afternoon from 2:30-5:30 and was held on-location here at Warnell. Throughout the afternoon, we listened to presentations given by graduate students as well as executives from Plum Creek, Rayonier, Resource Management Services (“RMS”), ArborGen and Georgia Pacific.
To begin the afternoon, we heard a graduate student presentation from Shawn Baker on the state of the logging industry followed by a presentation given by Harrison Hood, Yenie Tran and Virginia Morales on forestry markets as compared to other commodity markets over time.Following the two student presentations, we heard from Tom Lindquist, Plum Creek’s COO followed by Paul Boynton, CEO of Rayonier, Craig Blair, CEO of RMS, Andrew Baum, CEO of AborGen and Mike Adams of Georgia Pacific. There was a Q&A Session following the presentations as well.
You can view these presentations in their entirety here: CEO Rountable Presentations
It was an incredible day for students as they got to interact closely with top management across all of these great companies and get some “up close” exposure to the values and guiding principles behind each of them.
As part of the event, there was also a golf tournament on Friday morning as well as an Oyster Roast on Friday night.
We are so thankful for the support that we have here at the school and events like these are incredibly important for our students in not only raising money for graduate funding, but also for our students to hear first-hand what it’s like out there in the business world from those actually doing it.
All in all, it was a great few days for Warnell and the Center for Forest Business and we are very fortunate to have such incredible company leaders willing to share some of their time and their experiences with our students from time to time.
We look forward to hopefully continuing this event in the future!