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With much change, the doors to opportunities once closed open up because the status quo has been shaken, leaving gaps and paths to some phenomenal opportunities. The question this article explores is how to determine what is the optimal choice for you to pursue in this environment.
There are almost always pros and cons to staying at your current company versus moving elsewhere. With this much uncertainty in the work environment ...
If you accept the traditional folklore wisdom of “LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP,” the next steps are ...
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If riding out a storm with agile, quick movements that keep your organization in the safety of the hurricane’s eye is not an option, here are 3 enterprise risk management strategies that will help protect your institution from the brunt of the storm.
The safest place to be is in the eye of a hurricane as it’s a region of mostly calm weather, clear skies, and with the lowest air pressure within the storm. To figuratively “stay in the eye of the hurricane” requires the Board to be agile enough to move the company—in sync and in real time—with the hurricane until that storm fades away.
Boards that are most likely to succeed in this task are those with Board Chairs and Directors who are already adept experts in dealing with strategy and risk development for fast-paced complex situations; already utilizing benchmarks, compliance policies/processes, and risk management information and reporting systems (preferably in or close to real-time); and are comfortable with effective decision-making during high levels of uncertainty.
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Equifax’s Small Business Delinquency Index (SBDI) for the transportation industry continues to relentlessly spiral upwards to levels not seen since the Great Financial Crisis. These SBDI numbers in the above graph are not adjusted for inflation, so the situation is actually more dire. BOTTOM LINE:
Almost 100% of all goods (electronics, motor vehicles, pharmaceuticals, gravel, sand, hazardous materials, machinery, food, the vast majority of commodities)—that’s over 55.5 million tons of goods daily in the US—travel their last 250 miles via a short-haul (or short-distance) truck...and an uncomfortably high share of those trucking companies are close to bankruptcy...and there is no replacement transportation that can substitute for the service they provide, which is hauling your goods or components from the ships/airplanes/long-haul trucks to your grocery store, your wholesaler, your retailer, your home, your business.
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On October 12, 2025, Kathleen was a panelist on BOARD BOUND: A Strategic Guide to Landing Your 1st (& Next) Board Role at the NACD’s Annual Summit national conference in Washington, DC. There was much interest in her description of weak ties usefulness in identifying/securing board opportunities.
After reading this article, please read Dorlisa Flur’s The Magic Matrix: Purposeful Networking to Land Your Board Seat as it’s an excellent example of weak ties in action.
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Kathleen Graham’s Panelist Remarks During econVue's 8/25/25 Panel Presentation
These topics covered at the Jackson Hole 2025 Economic Symposium all involve factors that impact people significantly AND are all topics that are in flux currently, i.e., major impactors on people’s lives where what the outcome/direction will be is currently unknown. The question then becomes: how will people respond to such uncertainty in the near term? This article covers likely responses from US employers and US employees.
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Kathy Graham was requested by econVue to join as a Contributing Author and Panelist. econVue is a global consortium of economic, geopolitical experts from a wide range of specialties who discuss trending issues. econVue is also one of the top Substack thought leaders in terms of subscription numbers.
Kathy's Top 3 Predictions for 2025, which was all about The AI Explosion, was published on econVue on 1/16/2025. It turned out to be pretty timely given the news that arrived a week later about China's DeepSeek AI.
Kathy's predictions focus on:
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Corporate profits and growth (new markets/products, new/existing clients) happen through employing the best mixture of innovation, people, processes, and culture alignment. The heart of the puzzle is identifying, then executing, what would work best for your particular company and situation. Answering the 3 questions below will point the way to designing the optimal fit for all stakeholders—customers, community, and workforce from executives through rank and file—that actually delivers the desired profits and goals.
1. Does your company produce products/services that are exploitative innovations, i.e., are they improvements/changes to existing products/services? Example: are your company’s products/services like the Apple iPhone 14, which is an improvement on the first-generation Apple iPhone? If yes, then: ...
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1. The risk of unmet stakeholder expectations is incinerating business value.
2. Enterprise risk professionals recognize that it is vital to understand the expectations of stakeholders, which is only possible via the reporting of knowledgeable staff who have their fingers on the pulses of those stakeholders. These critical reporting processes are vulnerable to human frailties, such as the biases of management.
3. There is a path to mitigate human capital systemic bias, ensuring more reliable enterprise intelligence for the purposes of reputation risk management. This path is built around three core actions: ...