speaker-info

Mazen Skaf

Managing Director, Strategic Decisions Group

Mazen Skaf is a partner and managing director with Strategic Decisions Group (SDG), an international management consulting firm headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has extensive experience in strategy, corporate development, analytics, and decision support solutions. He has advised clients in a variety of industries including energy, technology and communications, infrastructure, and pharmaceuticals.

As several of his clients in the private sector took on cabinet-level appointments in the public sector, he has had the opportunity to work with them on transformative policy design in economic development, knowledge-based industries, job creation, resource allocation, and public-private partnerships. In addition to his consulting practice, Dr. Skaf is an instructor in the Stanford Strategic Decision and Risk Management certificate program, where he delivers courses and seminars in decision analysis, decision quality, corporate strategy, and risk management. Before joining SDG, Skaf was a member of the start-up team and a senior director of product marketing at Rapt Technologies, a leader in web media price optimization, which was acquired by Microsoft. Prior to that, he worked at General Motors in the Decision Support Center where he led the development of the product portfolio strategy for the company’s largest division.

Most recently, he was the Chief Business Officer of TRACON Pharmaceuticals where he directed overall corporate strategy and business development activities. Dr. Skaf holds a BS summa cum laude in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas and an MS and PhD in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University. His doctoral dissertation was on the use of financial engineering and real options in the design of negotiated agreements. In 1998, he was elected Fellow of the Stanford Center on Conflict Resolution and Negotiation. In 1999, and his client Donald W. Spillman from Shell Offshore, Inc. received the first INFORMS Decision Analysis Society Practice award for their work in portfolio management. He is also a Fellow of the Society of Decision Professionals. Skaf is a Wall Street Journal Expert Panelist on topics related to energy. His work and articles have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg Businessweek, and several other publications.

My Sessions

Energy Panel: Leveraging data to make great decisions

Mount Elbert A

There is a massive influx of data in Oil & Gas and Utilities. How do we use this data to make better decisions?  This panel will focus on challenges in building decision analytics on large-data platforms.  Solutions and lessons learned from applications in electric utility distribution systems, distributed energy resources, and oil & gas industry […]

Energy
READ MORE