YES, I know there are multiple wars going on. NO, this is NOT specifically about any of them. But if you see similarities ……

Did you hear that Unilever is buying McCormick’s spices? It’s a bit complicated.

Unilever is spinning off its food business to merge with spices leader McCormick & Company in a ginormous deal. The transaction, expected to close by mid-2027, creates a massive flavour-focused entity with over 20 billion dollars in annual revenue. I can’t even fathom how big that is. (Think two followed by ten zeros.)

My first thought wasn’t about market share or supply chain synergies or whatever the press release said. My first thought was: what happens when there is nobody left to conquer?

Because that’s what we’re watching, isn’t it? The largest companies on earth consuming the next-largest companies on earth, which will eventually consume the ones below them, in an endless game of consolidation that can only end one way. Not with a winner. With a wall.

We have built a global operating system, in our boardrooms, our governments, our institutions, that is predicated on infinite growth on a finite planet. And right now, in real time, that operating system is beginning to eat itself.

I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say it because I spent thirty years plus inside the machine. I’ve been through more than seventy acquisitions and ten dispositions. I know what the logic sounds like from the inside.

It sounds completely rational, right up until the moment it doesn’t.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand. This isn’t a failure of individual leaders. The people signing these deals aren’t villains. They’re running the programme they were handed. The problem is the programme itself. It is a ravenous beast that must be constantly fed.

And that is exactly what my latest podcast guest, Simon Mont, has devoted more than a decade to understanding. Simon is a lawyer, facilitator, and founder of Harmonize. He has worked with more than 500 organizations trying to figure out why good intentions keep producing the same broken outcomes.

His answer — and I think he’s right — is that we are all running an operating system we never consciously chose. A set of rules about how power works, who belongs, what counts as success, and what we’re willing to accept. Rules that were designed for a different world, by people with very different interests than yours or mine.

This is the operating system we inherited. Grow or die. Conquer or be conquered. Extract value. Maximize for shareholders. And it is so deeply embedded in how we think about organizations, leadership, and success that most of us can’t see it.

We just feel the results.

What Simon has spent years mapping is both the depth of the problem and — this is the part I didn’t expect — the precise intervention point. Not the global economy. Not the political system. Not some distant abstraction.

The organizations we’re inside of right now. The way our teams make decisions. The operating system we collectively run every single day.

That’s where it changes. Or doesn’t.

I released the first of a new four-part series this week titled You’re Playing Someone Else’s Game: The Operating System Underneath Business. Simon and I cover the full arc — from the puzzle itself, to the field of interventions that keep falling short, to the three forces running every organization on earth, to the history of how we got here and where we go next.

It is, I think, the most important conversation I’ve had yet on the podcast. Not because Simon has all the answers — he’ll be the first to tell you nobody does yet. But because he has the clearest map I’ve encountered of the territory we’re all trying to navigate.

If you are a leader — active, retired, or somewhere in between — who has felt the ground shifting and couldn’t quite name what you were sensing, this is definitely worth your time.

Like, what does happen when there’s nobody left to conquer?

I think we’re about to find out. I’d rather we had a different answer ready.

The series is live now. Listen and tell me your thoughts.