Most leadership advice is a collection of motivational stories or checklists pulled from someone else's company. Leadership Economics starts from a different premise: that leadership is an economic problem at its core, a question of scarce resources, incomplete information, and choices made under uncertainty. Aaron Phipps, an economist at West Point, and Spencer Clouatre, a retired Army Colonel and former Special Operations aviator, work through new ideas about how people actually decide, lead, and create, and they sit down with leaders from across sectors to hear how those leaders think about the challenges in front of them. The goal is not hacks or formulas. It is a sharper way of seeing your own situation, so you can diagnose what is actually wrong rather than what is most visible.
Leadership Economics
Claim This Podcastby Aaron Phipps and Spencer Clouatre
Podcast Overview
Most leadership advice is a collection of motivational stories or checklists pulled from someone else's company. Leadership Economics starts from a different premise: that leadership is an economic problem at its core, a question of scarce resources, incomplete information, and choices made under uncertainty. Aaron Phipps, an economist at West Point, and Spencer Clouatre, a retired Army Colonel and former Special Operations aviator, work through new ideas about how people actually decide, lead, and create, and they sit down with leaders from across sectors to hear how those leaders think about the challenges in front of them. The goal is not hacks or formulas. It is a sharper way of seeing your own situation, so you can diagnose what is actually wrong rather than what is most visible.
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4/28/2026
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Recent Episodes
July 28, 2026
How Others Feel When You're in the Room
<p>Ben Summers, head of Vanguard UK and one of the original authors of the economic ideas behind this show, on shutting down a business without abandoning the people in it, what a booby-trapped weapons cache taught him about letting success validate your own decisions, and why leadership comes down to how others feel when you're in the room.</p> <p>Ben Summers is Head of Vanguard UK. He served nearly 13 years as an Army officer, deploying twice to Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne Division as an aviation officer, and finished his service as an assistant professor of economics at West Point, where he taught leadership, economics, and finance and led the Academy's Scholar Programme. While he was teaching there he was one of the people who first wrote down the simple but powerful economic ideas that became the Leadership Economics playbook, which makes him a plank holder of this show's framework rather than a guest being introduced to it. Spencer mentored him as a cadet.</p> <p>The conversation opens with his own definition of the job: leadership is how others feel when you're in the room. He describes threading the needle between challenge and support with the image of running a hill at West Point, where a leader can sprint ahead and shout, call the whole thing off, or sweat it out beside the team.</p> <p>From there, Ben walks through shutting down Vanguard's German business, where the sunk cost logic was clear as day and the human dimension was not, and where he concluded that the most caring thing available to him was helping the organization be honest. He admits he then held the people at arm's length until a leader on the ground told him, "Ben, that wasn't your best visit." He talks about designing off-ramps before you need them, staging capital on a new offer until it earned the next tranche, and firing bullets before cannonballs.</p> <p>The hardest part of the episode is a mission he planned in Afghanistan in 2012. A campaign against weapons caches along the Pakistan border worked so well, so fast, that the team kept extending it, until a cache was booby trapped and ten people were killed. His reading of it is unsparing: there was no room for healthy divergence, and the unit was using its success to validate its decision-making process. That leads into the case for diverging before you converge, and for leaders secure enough to absorb the friction that divergence creates.</p> <p>The last third is about trust. Ben separates trust from warmth, splits it into credibility and the humility to be convinced you are wrong, and tells the story of watching dashboards that were green on the surface and red underneath. His team now hunts for the brutal facts on purpose. Aaron argues that trust is finally about alignment, and Ben closes on the hedgehog: passion, unique talent, and what the organization actually needs, aligned so that the motivation is intrinsic rather than bolted on.</p> <p><strong>Mentioned in this episode</strong></p> <ul> <li>Jocko Willink, "Discipline will give you freedom"</li> <li>Annie Duke on quitting and off-ramps</li> <li>Jeff Bezos and the one-way door / two-way door framework</li> <li>Jim Collins, Good to Great; "fire bullets, then cannonballs" and the hedgehog concept</li> <li>Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard</li> <li>Sean McMahon, co-author of the original economic ideas at West Point</li> <li>General David Petraeus</li> <li>Everett Spain, "leaders run towards the smoke"</li> <li>Josh Richardson, "great is just good over time" (Episode 3)</li> <li>Rob Shaw, "eat your frogs in the morning" (Episode 6)</li> <li>The 160th Night Stalkers</li> <li>Adam Smith and the brewer, the baker, and the butcher</li> <li>Maya Angelou on how you made people feel</li> </ul> <p><strong>Featured guest:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Ben Summers</strong> — Ben Summers is Head of Vanguard UK, where we serve millions of investors directly with our Personal Investor platform and indirectly through advisors and other intermediaries. Mr. Summers joined Vanguard in 2019 to lead the company's New Ways of Working initiative and most recently served as chief of staff to the former CEO, Tim Buckley. Prior to joining Vanguard, Mr. Summers served nearly 13 years as an officer in the US Army. His last role was an assistant professor of economics at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he taught courses in leadership, economics, and finance and led the Academy's Scholar Programme. In 2019, he received the William F. Murdy Award for Teaching Excellence. Before teaching at West Point, Mr. Summers deployed twice to Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne Division and held a range of leadership roles as an aviation officer. From 2012 to 2013, he led a turnaround of an aviation maintenance company and was awarded the General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award for his efforts. (<a href="https://www.vanguard.co.uk">Vanguard UK</a>)</li> </ul> <p>Subscribe to the newsletter — one short essay every other Tuesday: <a href="https://leadershipeconomics.com/">leadershipeconomics.com</a></p>
July 14, 2026
The Only Deal Breaker Is Character
<p>Rob Shaw, founding President and CEO of Echelon Bank and a 27-year Tampa Bay banker, on the soft information behind every good loan, the culture of a brand-new bank, and why character is the only hard no.</p> <p>Rob Shaw has spent 27 years in Tampa Bay banking, from AmSouth's management training program through leadership roles at Northern Trust, Signature Bank, USAmeriBank, NorthStar Bank, and Flagship Community Bank. In April 2026 he opened Echelon Bank, the first new bank in Tampa Bay in five years, with a founding team of bankers he has known for decades and his West Point classmate Jonathan Field as board chair.</p> <p>The conversation starts in physics and works its way to banking as a way of getting at the truth about a borrower. Rob walks through the five C's of credit, why character is the only hard no, and the soft information that is hard to discern just from a FICO score. The few loans he regrets, he says, all trace back to ignoring his gut, or that "hard-to-define" information. He also explains why he tells his team they are in the manufacturing business, turning their neighbors' deposits into loans, and why he wants problems on the table early rather than handled quietly. Spencer extends the currency of commitment idea from earlier episodes, and Rob explains the echelon formation that gave the bank its name. He closes with the advice he wishes he had taken sooner, in his own words: it's later than you think.</p> <p><strong>Mentioned in this episode</strong></p> <ul> <li>Isaac Newton and predictive equations</li> <li>The three-body problem</li> <li>The Heisenberg uncertainty principle</li> <li>AmSouth Bank, now part of Regions Bank</li> <li>FICO and the Fair Isaac Corporation; TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax</li> <li>Elon Musk</li> <li>David Feaster of Signature Bank ("eat your frogs in the morning")</li> <li>Greg Olivier, Echelon Bank board member</li> <li>Jonathan Field, Echelon Bank board chair</li> <li>Major Steven Reich and the Night Stalkers; A Soldier's Story (Fox Sports)</li> <li>The Tour de France and the echelon formation</li> </ul> <p><strong>Featured guest:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Rob Shaw</strong> — Following an honorable discharge after serving as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Finance Corps, Mr. Shaw began his banking career in 1998 with AmSouth Bank as a Management Associate. After completing the bank's executive training program in Birmingham, AL, he relocated to Tampa and quickly advanced from credit analyst and underwriter into commercial relationship management. He later joined Northern Trust as a Commercial and Private Banking Officer before moving into the community banking sector as the Clearwater Market Executive for Signature Bank. Following the bank's sale, he joined USAmeriBank as Pinellas County Team Leader, where he spent six years helping build one of the region's top-performing banking organizations. In 2014, Mr. Shaw became the Pinellas County Market President for NorthStar Bank and was later promoted to Senior Lender and COO. After the bank's sale in 2017, he partnered with two veteran bankers to acquire Flagship Community Bank in 2019. From the capital raise and due diligence process through post-acquisition leadership, he played a key role in the bank's growth and success, serving as Senior Loan Officer and overseeing business development through 2024. Over the course of his career, Mr. Shaw has personally closed hundreds of loans totaling approximately $530 million and has led teams responsible for well over $1 billion in commercial real estate and C&I lending transactions. Mr. Shaw earned a degree in Physics Engineering from United States Military Academy at West Point, holds an MBA from University of Phoenix, and is a graduate of the Stonier Graduate School of Banking at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is now the President and CEO of Echelon Bank in Clearwater, Florida. (<a href="https://echelon.bank">Echelon Bank</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/echelon-bank-io">Echelon Bank on LinkedIn</a>)</li> </ul> <p>Subscribe to the newsletter — one short essay every other Tuesday: <a href="https://leadershipeconomics.com/">leadershipeconomics.com</a></p>
June 30, 2026
The Person You're Trying to Become
<p>West Point economist Dean Dudley on how the best leaders reduce ambiguity, shape who their people become, and turn conflict into a problem disciplined thinking can actually solve.</p> <p>Dr. Dean Dudley retires from West Point this month after 33 years teaching economics and game theory to more than 33,000 cadets. He returns to the show to trace one thread from identity to game theory to the beaches of Normandy: what a leader actually does when the models stop working.</p> <p>The conversation runs from George Akerlof's identity economics, the idea that leaders and institutions can move the "bliss point" people measure themselves against, through the currency of commitment, to a working definition of the job itself: good leaders reduce ambiguity. Dean closes with the two case studies he teaches, D-Day and Gettysburg, showing how the side with the better model, not the bigger army, wins. Both anchor his forthcoming book, Game Theory and the Art of War, out in August. Along the way: why your team plays rock-paper-scissors against you and already knows you play rock, why a marriage is a harder allocation problem than a trip to Walmart, and why the most useful thing a leader can do is listen down.</p> <p><strong>Mentioned in this episode</strong></p> <ul> <li>George Akerlof, Nobel laureate, the "lemons" market and identity economics</li> <li>Identity Economics by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (recommended on air)</li> <li>Adam Smith, the invisible hand</li> <li>Sigmund Freud, id, ego, and superego</li> <li>John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, zero-sum game theory</li> <li>John Nash, the Nash equilibrium and non-zero-sum games</li> <li>Roger Myerson, Nobel laureate game theorist who reviewed Dean's book</li> <li>Bayesian and Bayesian-Nash equilibria</li> <li>Jordan Peterson, "chaos"</li> <li>Pema Chodron, "ungroundedness"</li> <li>The Night Stalkers (160th SOAR) creed</li> <li>D-Day: Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt</li> <li>The Battle of Gettysburg</li> <li>Game Theory and the Art of War by Dean Dudley (West Point Press, out August 2026)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Featured guest:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Dean Dudley</strong> — Dr. Dean Dudley is an Associate Professor of Economics at the United States Military Academy at West Point. A recipient of the West Point Superintendent's Award for Excellence, he has spent over thirty years teaching game theory and strategic choice to future military leaders. His research translates complex mathematical models into practical tools for both battlefield tactics and corporate boardroom strategy. (<a href="https://press.westpoint.edu/books/game-theory-and-the-art-of-war/">Game Theory and the Art of War, pre-order (West Point Press, August 2026)</a>, <a href="https://www.westpoint.edu/directory/dean-dudley">West Point directory</a>)</li> </ul> <p>Subscribe to the newsletter — one short essay every other Tuesday: <a href="https://leadershipeconomics.com/">leadershipeconomics.com</a></p>
7 total episodes available
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