Economic Thinking for Strategic Leaders

摘要

Military senior leaders today operate within increasingly volatile environments characterized by greater information-processing demands and a need to solve ill-defined, novel, and complex problems. To ensure their organizations adapt for long-term success, strategic-level leaders require the cognitive skills to make sense of and successfully navigate within these complex environments and anticipate the future. To enhance the skills required to think strategically, the U.S. Army has taken a multidisciplinary perspective to educating its future leaders. Various thinking lenses are introduced to teach various thinking skills, with the exception of the discipline of economics. The U.S. Army should include Economic Thinking in any properly developed multidisciplinary framework for cognitive skills required of sound strategic thinkers. Failure to include this specific thinking skill could result in future Army leaders unprepared to analyze certain complex, ambiguous issues and craft informed decisions.