ECONOMICS & POLICY Blaming corporate greed makes for good politics. But the real driver of rising prices is something far more fundamental — and far less discussed. Every time grocery bills climb, restaurant checks balloon, or an insurance renewal arrives with a double-digit increase, the instinct is to blame greed. Politicians say it. Pundits repeat it. Businesses, the story goes, are simply extracting more profit because they can. But that story is incomplete — and unders

By Kevin McDonnell You’re Not Stuck—Your Thinking Is Most leaders like to think of themselves as adaptive, creative problem solvers. But under pressure—during integrations, restructurings, or periods of rapid growth—we tend to default to what’s familiar. The frameworks that once made us successful become shortcuts. Experience becomes a filter. Instead of increasing clarity, it quietly narrows situational awareness . Situational awareness is not just knowing what’s happening

As organizations scale, leaders often struggle to answer a deceptively simple question: What actually changes about managerial ability as careers progress? Titles grow, scopes expand, and decision rights widen—but many organizations lack a coherent model explaining how thinking, judgment, and time-horizon must evolve. More than three decades ago, Elliott Jaques offered one of the most rigorous answers to this question in his seminal work on Stratified Systems Theory (SST)