About Mike

Mike Fisher is a lifelong Alaskan with a quarter-century of experience in professional services, and a parallel life spent in demanding Alaskan wilderness. Those two things are not separate, but inform each other in ways that shape everything he does.

The Professional Side

Mike has spent decades using data and analysis to help organizations make decisions. With Hess Mountain Group LLC, he helps nonprofits and businesses navigate complex challenges they face with strategy, funding, risk, and operations. He brings graduate-level rigor and hard-won practical experience to every engagement, and has published work on cost and capital project risk in Alaska’s resource and infrastructure sectors. He is direct, honest, and most interested in work where clear thinking and genuine expertise make a real difference.

Mike is selective about the work he takes on, by design. A focused practice means clients get full attention rather than a distracted one, and it means the work stays connected to the experiences and perspectives that make it worth doing in the first place.

Mike’s two decades of work in port and harbor economics in archived at HarborModel.com. His work includes contributions to the Harbor Economic Impact Model used by communities across Alaska, as well as more than twenty years of research and presentations on harbor planning, rate-setting, and coastal infrastructure decision-making. His professional background is also the foundation for a forthcoming book on port and harbor economics, currently in development.

The Outdoor Side

Mike has hiked, paddled, and backpacked through some of Alaska’s most remote and unforgiving places, well beyond the beaten path, where the margin for error is real and the wilderness couldn’t care less about your plans.

He enjoys studying survival and disaster psychology, not as an academic exercise but because he has found himself in situations where those dynamics were playing out around him in real time. He has learned to think aloud and communicate conditions, trade-offs, and risk tolerances; debrief honestly; and recognize the stories we tell ourselves under pressure, rationalizations about conditions that make sense in the moment but were obvious signs of failure in hindsight. He has also learned that the wilderness rewards the same qualities that make for good strategy anywhere: honest assessment, rigorous preparation, clear-eyed adaptation, and the humility to recognize when your assumptions are wrong and it’s time to make a course correction.

These aren’t lessons you can just borrow from a book.

The Connection

Hess Mountain Group LLC takes its name from Hess Mountain in the Alaska Range of Interior Alaska. Hess, along with its sister mountains that march across Interior Alaska, form a dramatic backdrop for years of adventure and the self-reflective thinking that happens in wild places. The name reflects a simple belief: the wilderness is an unusually honest teacher and what it teaches is directly relevant to the challenges organizations and leaders face every day.

That belief is the foundation of everything I do.

Mike is based in Alaska and works with clients across the country.