I don't think there's any insinuation.

> For instance, I'm willing to bet the information in a combination of 'Lean Analytics' and 'High Output Management' would exceed the value of an entire MBA curriculum (which is anyway mostly focused on dealing with big company problems).

That's a common cliché, but it's only partly true. There are problems that only occur at large scale (complex mergers, fancy legal structures, sophisticated financing). But the fundamental problems are all the same at every size. You need to manage cashflow, you need customers to become aware of the product or service and buy it, you need to be able to do things at a lower cost than your selling price, you need to keep proper records, pay wages, pay taxes, pay debts, manage inventory.

These are universal problems of business.

A whale has problems that a dolphin does not. But they both breathe, both pump blood, both eat and digest and move of their own volition.

I feel there's often value in humbling yourself before another profession and seeing what you can learn.

> You need to manage cashflow, you need customers to become aware of the product or service and buy it, you need to be able to do things at a lower cost than your selling price, you need to keep proper records, pay wages, pay taxes, pay debts, manage inventory.

Half these things take under a few days to learn sufficiently for any business with ARR under ~$1M. And you can anyway hire people to fill in the gaps in your own knowledge for basically peanuts.

And there's no MBA program that will teach you strategies that are especially useful in reaching customers - if there was a professor who really could teach that, (s)he'd be monetizing that skillset instead.

All this depends on your goals. I want to make that very clear. There is almost no value to an MBA for someone intending to build something from the ground up. There is potentially tremendous value for someone looking to have a career in business at larger companies.

> Half these things take under a few days to learn sufficiently for any business with ARR under ~$1M.

And publishers used to sell "TEACH YOURSELF C++ IN 21 DAYS". Doesn't make it so.

> And there's no MBA program that will teach you strategies that are especially useful in reaching customers

There are courses about exactly and entirely this.

> if there was a professor who really could teach that, (s)he'd be monetizing that skillset instead.

A lot of business professors are independently wealthy from side businesses. Karl Ulrich springs to mind as a serial entrepreneur, teaching at Wharton.

> There is potentially tremendous value for someone looking to have a career in business at larger companies.

This is true for some MBAs or, rather, some course designs. But there's no law that professors at business schools can't study, themselves experience and teach entrepreneurship. Because they do. The faculty at Wharton or Stanford have honest-to-goodness entrepreneurs because they want to be there.

It's one thing to say that teaching is an imperfect substitute for doing. It's another thing to say that there's some mystical essence that business schools are somehow magically blind to and stoically opposed to learning about, studying, experimenting with and teaching.

No, I didn't mean smart people can't pick up business. I meant you would assume smart people know business as common sense, but they don't necessarily do.

You saying a combination of 2 books would exceed a entire MBA curriculum is the true "pure hoohah" here.

I went to school for CS, and decided to add on a BBA since I could do it basically for free. Prior to school, I was extensively read in the category of books you describe. While you're not wrong that you can get most knowledge from reading famous business books and using some intuition, you also don't know what you don't know, and that little bit has outsized value because it is important, non-intuitive, and hard to find--I suspect it's the secret sauce everyone keeps to themselves and isn't talked about by virtue of being relatively boring. Sure, you could read it in any old textbook, but you probably wouldn't think to.