About

Why we built Leadership Economics.

Most leadership advice is a collection of stories, heuristics, and personality frameworks disconnected from any underlying theory. It works sometimes, it fails other times, and you rarely know why. What is missing is a genuine understanding of what leadership is — and a coherent framework of human behavior that informs how to lead.

We believe leadership is an act of creation, combining people, resources, and decisions in ways they would not combine on their own. That makes it an economic problem at its core: scarce resources, incomplete information, and choices made under uncertainty. Economics gives us a language for these problems. Combined with what we know from psychology and neuroscience about how people actually think and decide, it gives us something better than a checklist.

Read about the framework →

The Framework

One lens. Four functions.

We build upward from first principles of human behavior. The result is a framework we call AIME — Allocation, Information, Motivation, and Execution — the four supports any act of leadership rests on. Use them as buckets for sorting the work in front of you, and as a diagnostic for finding where a problem actually lives.

01 Allocation. Deploy what is scarce where it matters most.

02 Information. Read the signals that tell you what is actually happening.

03 Motivation. Align personal purpose with the team’s mission.

04 Execution. Set the intent; let the people closest own the means.

There is no leadership formula. If there were, leadership would cease being necessary. What we offer instead is a lens for seeing your own challenges more clearly, so you can address the right problem rather than the most visible one.

The People

Aaron Phipps

Co-founder · Economist

Aaron is an economist who studies how people develop valuable skills, how organizations cultivate talent, and what it takes to manage and lead people effectively. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Virginia and is an Associate Professor of Economics at West Point. His research has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, and Journal of Public Economics, and has been supported by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Upjohn Institute.

At West Point, Aaron created the Leadership Economics course, which draws on economics, organizational behavior, and neuroscience to build a more rigorous understanding of how people make decisions and how leaders can shape better outcomes. He grew up in Auburn, California, and earned his undergraduate degree in economics and statistics from Brigham Young University. Aaron and his wife Jaimie have been married for sixteen years and have three young children.

Spencer Clouatre

Co-founder · Retired U.S. Army Colonel

Spencer is a retired U.S. Army Colonel with over three decades of leadership in high-stakes environments. He began his career as an enlisted combat engineer in 1988, earned his commission from West Point in 1995, and went on to serve as an assault helicopter pilot in the XVIII Airborne Corps and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Night Stalkers), with multiple deployments to Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He holds an MBA from Vanderbilt University, a master’s degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College, and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Spencer served twice at West Point: first as an Assistant Professor of Economics, and later leading the Economics Program as an Academy Professor from 2016 to 2022. It was during his first tour that he began connecting what he taught in the economics classroom to the leadership challenges he had faced in command, an insight that eventually became the foundation of Leadership Economics. After retiring from the Army, he continued developing these ideas through consulting and speaking engagements. Spencer and his wife Jill have been together for over 37 years and have three adult children and two grandchildren.