Free returns are presented as a mark of progress — a sign that retail has finally bent to consumer power. Click, try, send back what you don’t like. No cost. No risk. But free returns are not the removal of cost. They are the reassignment of it . What looks like convenience at the checkout is a system that quietly redistributes risk, labour, and waste across people and places that never opted in. The illusion works because the cost is diffused, delayed, and hidden from view.

In film, music, and content creation, nobody really believes in masterplans. This aligns to our previous piece on the best leaders thinking in mico-moves. Careers don’t unfold neatly.Algorithms change.Funding disappears.Platforms shift incentives without warning. Yet work still gets made. Not because creators have perfect strategies — but because they make small, deliberate moves  that let them stay in the system long enough to be seen. Why Masterplans Fail in Creative Indust

While tipping exists in many countries, the United States offers the clearest example of what happens when gratuity becomes the wage — not the reward. In the United States, tipping is often framed as a moral gesture. Be kind.Reward good service. Help someone out. But for millions of food servers, tips aren’t a bonus. They are the primary income mechanism . Which raises an uncomfortable question: is tipping really about kindness — or is it how the service economy actually func

Every January, millions of people make the same quiet decision: for 31 days, they stop drinking alcohol. On the surface, Dry January  looks like a personal health challenge. A reset after excess. A short-term pause. But looked at through a business lens, it does something far more interesting: it briefly disrupts a deeply embedded consumption system — and reveals how much of modern social and economic life is built around drinking as the default. January Has Always Been Fragi

Business didn’t begin with companies, currencies, or contracts. It began more than 10,000 years ago , when people first started exchanging goods, labour, and skills to survive. Long before governments or formal institutions existed, trade shaped who lived where, who depended on whom, and how communities formed. Business wasn’t an abstract system layered on top of society — it was one of the earliest ways society organised itself . And despite how complex the modern economy ha

Most notebooks are designed with an ending built in. You fill them. You close them. You discard them. It feels normal — almost inevitable. But it’s worth asking a quieter question: who decided that writing tools should be disposable in the first place? That decision wasn’t made by consumers. It was made by design choices, supply chains, and business models that assumed replacement was easier — and more profitable — than reuse. The System Behind Everyday Paper Paper feels harm

Procurement is one of the most powerful business systems most people never see. Every year, governments, hospitals, universities, housing providers, and large corporations spend billions through tenders and contracts. On paper, these processes exist to ensure fairness, value, and accountability. In practice, procurement quietly decides which businesses get the chance to grow  — and which are excluded before they ever compete. Procurement as a Filtering Mechanism Procurement f

B Corp is often treated as a shortcut to “doing good business”. A certification.A logo.A score. But frameworks don’t create impact on their own. Decisions do. So the real question isn’t whether B Corp exists — it’s whether frameworks like it actually change how businesses behave , and whether communities feel the difference. What Frameworks Like B Corp Are Designed to Do At their core, frameworks like B Corp try to solve a practical problem: Business decisions are complex, an