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I have another analogy I sometimes use. If you're floating down a Mississippi made of money, it seems like everything works. Navigate, don't navigate. Tight ship, loose ship. Expensive paddle boat or a few planks lashed together. Everything moves in the right direction. So long as you manage not to find the edges of a famously wide river, you will move swiftly and effortlessly.

When the river of cash begins to dry up, or if you started in a creek and stayed in a creek, things are a bit harder.

I think you could extend this observation even further. Business culture has a habit of sh*ting on new knowledge as being useless because businessmen often lack these knowledge yet still manage to succeed. An example of this is the general disdain for innovative approaches.

They fail to realize that the reason they're succeeding is not because traditional business know-how is useful but rather because crony capitalism allows you to succeed without innovation. However this advantage disappears once a market disrupter appears. We are currently in a golden age of innovation, but that won't last forever.

There is definitely a case to be made about old stodgy incumbents getting in the way of innovation. But my point isn't really about innovation disrupting the old but rather people throwing out the baby with the bath water when it comes to the relevance of business know-how.

While I agree well-established knowledge is useful (don't get me started about NoSQL, for one thing), I'm not seeing any disdain for business know-how. What I'm seeing is the well-founded belief that you get business know-how from being in business, not from sitting in a classroom and coming out with a piece of paper.

I agree that experience from doing does trump book knowledge. But it would also be a mistake to discard the basic foundation that book knowledge grants you. Lots of rookie mistakes can be avoided by having some foundational knowledge.

Maybe. It depends on what you consider "foundational".

The Lean Manufacturing people, for example, have very different foundations than traditional American MBAs. Not opposite, really; more orthogonal. For example, MBAs focus on cost reduction and profit increase; in the Lean world you focus on reducing waste and increasing customer value. This leads to different accounting systems, different management structures, different outcomes.

Reading about the history of Toyota, where Lean ideas were developed, I suspect it's not accidental that they were both physically and culturally very distant from American business thinking. And that the background of Toyotas leaders was in engineering, not commerce.

Often when you ignore received wisdom, you are just forced to relearn it. But sometimes, you end up somewhere that nobody's been before.

An example of this is the general disdain for business know-how in the form of say an MBA

Our issue isn't with business skills and the people who have them. Those skills are really fucking important.

It's the entitlement that seems to come with elite MBAs that is irritating. They tend to think they know more than they do.

Also, as one who has talked with people looking to be business co-founders, there's a lot of "49er syndrome" (4s who think they're 9s). Look, man, I'm a Tech 8. I might work with a Biz 7+. Biz 6? Probably not. Biz 7 means that after a week of legwork, you're already deciding among term sheets. Biz 8 means you can get a half-hour conversation with anyone, except perhaps a head of state where it might be hit or miss. A typical top-5 MBA graduate is only a Biz 5 or 6; not unimpressive, but not what I'm looking for if I'm going to deal with the stress of a startup.