Jackson reflects on the transition that he had to make when he left his job at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to become a doctoral student at Berkeley. The shift from a systems perspective to a social-sciences mindset required rewiring his approach to analysis to focus on mechanisms through which important things are accomplished in organizations. After writing a series of field-spanning papers -- first linking transaction-cost economics with population ecology, and then linking the knowledge-based perspective with transaction-cost thinking -- he turned toward a managerially grounded shift in unit analysis. In this talk, Jackson reflects on and defines how he synthesized the knowledge-based perspective with a problem-oriented view on the challenges facing managers. This led him directly into thinking about how those problems are framed and conceptualized throughout organizations. Now as Dean of the St. Louis University's Chaifetz School of Business, Jackson is supporting students, educators and staff in fulfilling their promise as fully rounded and fully developed humanistic individuals with the capacity to bring compassion and insight to problem solving.