Graham International Consulting and Research Inc

09/08/2026

Quick tip: Put your ask in the first sentence of the message.
Not after the context. Not after the background. First.
"I need your approval on the vendor contract by Thursday — here's the background."
People decide whether to keep reading in about five seconds. Give them the point before you lose them.

09/07/2026

Every team has a standard. It's rarely the one written on the wall.
The real standard is whatever you walk past without saying anything.
The meeting that always starts late. The report that's always a little sloppy. The comment that wasn't quite okay.
Say nothing, and you've set the bar. Not with a policy — with silence.
Culture isn't what you announce. It's what you're willing to address.

09/04/2026

Friday challenge: Revisit an old favorite.

An album you wore out years ago. A movie you loved at nineteen. A restaurant you used to go to every week and somehow stopped.

Not something new. Something you already know you love and simply drifted away from.

We spend a lot of energy chasing the next thing. Some of the best hours of a weekend come from going back to something that already worked.

09/03/2026

A perspective from the UN Global Compact worth keeping in mind, especially for anyone who works with or supplies to larger organizations:

Small and medium-sized enterprises make up roughly 90% of businesses worldwide and account for about half of total employment. An estimated 80% of global trade moves through supply chains.

Which means the decisions small businesses make about how they operate carry further than most owners realize. So do the standards larger companies set for the partners they choose.

Sustainability conversations tend to focus on big corporations. The actual leverage is distributed much more widely than that.

With an estimated 80 per cent of global trade passing through supply chains, businesses have an opportunity to create meaningful change by focusing on sustainable practices with the companies, organiz

09/02/2026

Some numbers from Gallup's research on manager development that are worth sitting with:

47% of employees say they received feedback from their manager a few times or less in the past year.

Only 34% strongly agree their manager knows what projects they're currently working on.

Only 26% strongly agree the feedback they do get actually helps them do their work better.

Gallup's chief scientist Jim Harter frames the shift plainly: people no longer want an annual review at the end of the year. They want ongoing conversations with someone invested in developing them.

The gap here isn't a training problem. It's a frequency problem.

Learn what manager development is, why managers shape engagement and performance, and how organizations build effective manager development strategies.

09/01/2026

Quick tip: Before you put a meeting on the calendar, ask whether a short written update would do the same job.

A lot of meetings exist to share information, not to make a decision. Those can usually be a paragraph.

Save the calendar for the conversations that actually need everyone in the room.

08/31/2026

Think about the leaders you actually remember.

Odds are it isn't because of a quarter they hit or a strategy they wrote.

It's because they said your name in a room you weren't in. They handed you the credit when they could have kept it. They made you look good in front of someone who mattered.

Recognition costs a leader almost nothing. It stays with people for decades.

Somebody on your team did good work recently. Make sure the right people know it was them.