Markets have changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years, but only for organizations at the top of the economy.

Rowan’s remark contrasts the dramatic transformation of markets—often driven by globalization, digitization, and platform-based business models—with the uneven distribution of those benefits. The claim is that large, top-tier organizations have been able to exploit new market structures (data, networks, scale efficiencies, regulatory leverage) in ways that smaller firms, local enterprises, and ordinary workers have not. Implicitly, “markets” may look modern and fluid at the top while remaining constrained, fragmented, or precarious lower down. The quote functions as a critique of winner-take-most dynamics: innovation has not produced a uniformly more open or competitive economy, but rather a stratified one in which the most powerful actors experience the greatest change and advantage.