In the pilot, Aaron and Spencer argue that great leaders are quietly good economists, and introduce AIME (Allocation, Information, Motivation, Execution) as the four focal points of a leader's job.

The pilot episode of Leadership Economics. Aaron and Spencer trace how the framework took shape. Spencer brings the operational side, a career flying assault helicopters and teaching at West Point. Aaron brings the academic side, an economics dissertation on incentives. Together they lay out the case for treating leadership as an economics problem and introduce the AIME framework (Allocation, Information, Motivation, Execution) as the four focal points of a leader's job. Every future episode will return to one or more of those pillars.

What we cover

• Why the leadership shelf is full of books but short on a definition
• Why first principles thinking, the way Newton built physics, beats pattern-matching from observed greats
• Spencer's path from enlisted combat engineer to special operations aviation to the West Point Economics Department
• Aaron's dissertation on teacher performance incentives, and the puzzle of why big financial incentives so rarely work
• The Joint Allocation Meeting (JAM) in Afghanistan, a single decision that touched all four AIME functions at once
• A first look at AIME: Allocation, Information, Motivation, Execution

Mentioned

• Adam Smith and David Hume, the intellectual lineage of treating human behavior with rigor
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell), Aaron's closing reference to the "coordinated soul"

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