Replacing the MBA: Venture Mode, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Business Education

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Following principles of business administration is the path to disaster for your business or any business. Yet business administration is what’s taught in business school and revered as the highest goal of management. We need to change how we think about business, which requires changing our mental model.

Entrepreneurial leadership is the new mental model..

In Part 2 of the special 3-part series of The Value Creators Podcast featuring the alternative approach to the business administration methods taught in MBA school, Venture Mode, Hunter Hastings and co-author Mark Packard continue their exposition of what comes after traditional business administration. Together, they examine how business schools institutionalize bureaucracy, why reform from inside the system is nearly impossible, and how administration mode crowds out entrepreneurial leadership.

They introduce a radically different alternative: the Master of Business Enterprise (MBE)—a new model of business education grounded in entrepreneurship, experimental learning, uncertainty, and real-world value creation. The conversation explores why customers—not processes or analytics—must be at the center of business thinking, and why skills like empathy, judgment, creativity, and tenacity are essential for navigating uncertainty.

This episode challenges long-held assumptions about business models, what business education should teach, who it should serve, and how entrepreneurial leaders are truly developed.

Key Insights:

  • Why the MBA reinforces administration mode and systematically underproduces entrepreneurial leaders.
  • How exploration, discovery, and customer-centered value reshape business education.
  • Why entrepreneurship must be learned through practice, empathy, and real-world experience.

Resources:

➡️ Learn What They Didn’t Teach You In Business School: The Value Creators Online Business Course

Connect with Mark Packard on LinkedIn

Get the book “Venture Mode: Escape the Administration Trap”

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

Knowledge Capsule

1. Administration Mode Is Institutionalized Through Business Schools

  • How did we fall into the administration trap? Because all business education trains students in a scientific, administrative approach to management.
  • Graduates carry administration mode into organizations, reinforcing bureaucracy and control systems.
  • This institutional pipeline makes entrepreneurial leadership increasingly rare. It is actively suppressed.

2. The MBA Teaches Management, Not Entrepreneurship

  • The MBA curriculum focuses on efficiency, optimization, and process control.
  • Entrepreneurship requires creativity and judgment under uncertainty, not rule-following.
  • Administrative training limits adaptability in dynamic markets.

3. Accreditation Reinforces Bureaucracy

  • Business schools must teach administration to remain accredited.
  • The requirements of the business administration cartel discourage experimentation and reform.
  • Breaking from administration mode often means losing institutional legitimacy.

4. Reforming Business Education From Within Is Unlikely

  • Universities are among the most administrative organizations in existence.
  • Structural incentives favor compliance over innovation.
  • Entrepreneurship must emerge outside traditional academic systems.

5. The Master of Business Enterprise (MBE) is an Alternative

  • The MBE shifts focus from administration to entrepreneurship.
  • It emphasizes uncertainty, value creation, and real-world problem solving.
  • The goal is developing entrepreneurial leaders, not administrators.

6. Subjectivism as the Foundation of Entrepreneurship

  • People are conscious, thinking agents—not controllable automatons.
  • Value is subjective – formed in experience – and must be understood from the customer’s perspective.
  • Businesses must learn from people rather than attempt to control them.

7. Customers Are the Central Focus of Value Creation

  • Understanding customer experiences requires emotion and empathy, not analytics alone.
  • Entrepreneurs must learn how customers think and feel.
  • Deep customer understanding drives innovation and growth.

8. Entrepreneurship Operates Under Genuine Uncertainty

  • Future customer choices cannot be predicted with data or statistics.
  • Administrative tools fail in uncertain, dynamic environments.
  • Entrepreneurs must design adaptive systems rather than rigid plans.

9. Entrepreneurial Skills Can Be Developed, Not Standardized

  • Skills like empathy, judgment, and creativity can be nurtured through practice.
  • Entrepreneurship is not a checklist or blueprint or method.
  • Learning requires experience, reflection, and iteration.

10. Empathy Is a Trainable Entrepreneurial Skill

  • True empathy means understanding experiences from the customer’s point of view.
  • Surveys and surface-level research are insufficient.
  • Entrepreneurs must immerse themselves in customers’ lived experiences.

11. Judgment, Creativity, and Tenacity Matter More Than Analytics

  • Statistical analysis cannot guide decisions about unknown futures.
  • Better judgment comes from understanding uncertainty and knowledge gaps.
  • Tenacity grows when entrepreneurs are prepared for downside risks.

12. Experiential Learning Is Essential to Entrepreneurship

  • Entrepreneurship is learned by doing, not by lecture alone.
  • Practicum and apprenticeship models accelerate skill development.
  • Real projects create real learning under real constraints.

Timestamps

Chapters:

00:00 – Why Business Schools Produce Administrators, Not Entrepreneurs
02:10 – How the MBA Institutionalizes Administration Mode
04:50 – Why Accreditation Prevents Real Reform
07:15 – Introducing the Master of Business Enterprise (MBE)
09:50 – Subjectivism, Customers, and Value Creation
12:45 – Why Entrepreneurship Cannot Be Reduced to Checklists
15:40 – Teaching Empathy, Judgment, and Creativity
19:20 – Learning Entrepreneurship Through Practice
23:30 – Who Is the Real Customer of Business Education?
31:45 – The Future of Entrepreneurial Leadership

Venture Mode: How Businesses Can Escape the Administration Trap with Mark Packard

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The most damaging error for a business is to run in administration mode. It’s the worst way to run a business. Yet it’s given the highest accolade: the greatest credential you can get is an MBA, a master’s in business ADMINISTRATION.  Administration mode is parroted in every business book, business periodical, and online business education. Administration is a trap baited with best practices, process lock-in, inflexible resource allocation, risk aversion, and impossibilities like strategic planning and financial forecasting.  

To save American business from the administration trap, Mark Packard and Hunter Hastings wrote a book titled Venture Mode – the alternative to administration mode. In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Mark and Hunter talk about why administration is so deeply flawed in the context of today’s fast-paced, innovative economy — and what to do instead.

Together, they introduce a fundamentally different operating model that replaces bureaucracy, internal control, and prediction with entrepreneurial leadership and relentless customer value creation. In this first of three special episode of The Value Creators podcast, the authors explain how administrative thinking became institutionalized through business schools and management science — and why it is quietly destroying productivity, innovation, and growth.

Key Insights:

  • Administration mode turns off the entrepreneurial engine and replaces value creation with value replication.
  • Venture mode shifts focus from internal processes and control to continuous adaptation around customer value.
  • Entrepreneurship is not limited to startups — it is a scalable economic function essential for long-term growth.

If organizations aim to survive and thrive in uncertain markets, they must escape administration mode and rediscover entrepreneurship as their core operating logic.

Resources:

➡️ Get the book “Venture Mode: Escape the Administration Trap”

Connect with Mark Packard on LinkedIn

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

Knowledge Capsule

 Administration mode dominates modern organizations

  • Most organizations today operate primarily in administration mode rather than entrepreneurial mode.
  • Administration mode prioritizes control, efficiency, and internal processes over value creation.
  • This operating model becomes more entrenched as organizations grow and mature.

2. Administration mode suppresses entrepreneurship

  • Entrepreneurial behavior declines when rules, procedures, and approvals dominate decision-making.
  • Employees are incentivized to follow processes and rules instead of solving customer problems.
  • Innovation is perceived as “too risky” and is discouraged within administrative systems.

3. Bureaucracy is a learned behavior

  • Organizations are not naturally bureaucratic; bureaucracy is taught and and built and reinforced over time.
  • Business education plays a central role in normalizing administrative thinking.
  • Leaders replicate the systems they were trained to believe are “best practices.”

4. Business schools imported positivism into management

  • Management theory borrowed scientific methods from the natural sciences.
  • Positivism assumes organizations can be measured, predicted, and optimized mechanically.
  • This worldview ignores the subjective, dynamic and sometimes unpredictable nature of human action.

5. Positivist thinking fails in economic systems

  • Human beings make choices based on judgment, not fixed variables.
  • Markets evolve through learning, adaptation, and experimentation.
  • Predictive models break down in complex, uncertain environments.

6. Administration prioritizes replication over discovery

  • Administrative systems are designed to repeat known processes efficiently.
  • Discovery of new value is seen as disruptive rather than essential.
  • Over time, organizations become optimized for the past instead of the future.

7. Venture mode offers an alternative operating logic

  • Venture mode treats the firm as a portfolio of entrepreneurial initiatives.
  • Decision-making focuses on learning, experimentation, and adaptation.
  • The organization remains flexible and responsive to market signals.

8. Venture mode centers on customer value creation

  • Customer value becomes the primary organizing principle of the firm.
  • Insights flow from customer experiences rather than internal reports.
  • Success is measured by the value delivered and experienced, not by process compliance.

9. Entrepreneurship is a scalable business function

  • Entrepreneurship is not limited to startups or founders.
  • Large organizations require continuous entrepreneurial activity to grow.
  • Venture mode enables entrepreneurship to persist at scale.

10. Loyalty is conditional on ongoing value creation

  • Customers do not remain loyal without continued value improvement.
  • Past success does not protect firms from competitive displacement.
  • Organizations must constantly earn customer preference through innovation.

11. Bureaucracy imposes massive economic costs

  • Administrative overhead absorbs resources that could fuel innovation.
  • Productivity declines as organizations add layers of control.
  • Economic growth slows when entrepreneurship is systematically constrained.

12. Leadership must shift from control to value creation

  • Leaders must let go of prediction and embrace uncertainty.
  • Judgment and experimentation replace rigid planning and forecasts.
  • Venture leadership restores entrepreneurship as the engine of growth.

Chapters:

00:00 – Why administration is a terrible way to run a business
02:10 – Introducing Venture Mode and the administration trap
03:05 – Manager mode vs. entrepreneurial leadership
06:12 – Why bureaucracy kills innovation and agility
09:01 – How positivism shaped business education
14:18 – The real economic cost of bureaucracy
19:12 – Entrepreneurship as the source of growth
22:35 – What venture mode really means
26:08 – Entrepreneurship beyond startups
28:38 – The mindset shift from administration to venture mode