12 Leaders Loop skills on economics & market forces. Read each one, then prove it with a short Skill Check to build toward your Leaders Loop Credentials.
The moment you delegate, you hand a goal to someone whose interests don't perfectly match yours, and the gap between what you want and what they're actually paid to do is where most management surprises live.
Some of the most expensive things your team produces never show up on an invoice. Learn to see the spillovers, and to decide whether to price them, fence them, or govern them.
Every time you choose to hire instead of contract, build instead of license, or own instead of partner, you are answering one of economics' oldest questions, why do firms exist at all? Here's the theory that answers it, and how to use it on your next make-or-buy call.
Some products get better the more people use them, and a few of those connect two different crowds who each need the other to show up first. Understanding which kind you have changes almost every decision you'll make.
Two sets of decisions you don't control, what the central bank does to interest rates, and what the government does to tax and spending, reach almost every line of your plan. Here is how the signal travels, and what to do before it lands.
Most of your hardest calls, who to hire, who to trust with the budget, which supplier is bluffing, are really one problem: the other side knows something you don't. Information economics names that problem and, better, tells you what to do about it.
The most counter-intuitive useful idea in economics says you should hand work to someone slower than you, and it's the sharpest test there is for who should do what on your team.
Classical economics assumes people choose like calculators. They don't, and they get it wrong in regular, predictable ways. Behavioural economics is the map of those regularities, and it changes how you set prices, design choices, and read your own decisions.
Two small ideas from microeconomics quietly run most of the decisions you make as a leader: decide at the margin, not the average, and assume your people will do whatever your incentives actually reward, not what you hoped they'd do.
Four numbers move almost every market you operate in. You don't need to forecast them, you need to read them well enough to know which way the wind is blowing before you set the sails.
Four shapes of competition govern how much pricing power you actually have, and most strategy mistakes come from reading the shape wrong. Here is how to read it.
A price is not a verdict on your product, it is a piece of information about scarcity. Learn to read it, and to ask one question before you ever change it: how much will the other side actually move?
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