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

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

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

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

What is the real purpose of the firm: creating value or capturing it?

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings is joined by Ashutosh Garg to explore one of the most fundamental misunderstandings in modern business thinking—the confusion between value creation and value capture. While traditional economic and management frameworks emphasize profit extraction, pricing power, and competitive positioning, Ashutosh explains why these ideas can mislead firms away from their true role in the economy.

The conversation reframes the firm as a value creation system, where profit is not the goal but the result of successfully serving customers. Together, they unpack how focusing on value capture leads to short-term thinking, distorted incentives, and weakened customer relationships, while a value creation mindset unlocks long-term growth and resilience.

Key Insights:

• Why value capture is often misunderstood as the goal of the firm rather than a consequence of value creation
• How profit emerges as a signal of successfully serving customers—not as an objective to optimize directly
• Why firms that focus on customer value outperform those focused on extraction, pricing, and competitive advantage

If you want to rethink strategy, profit, and the role of business in society, this episode offers a powerful shift in perspective.

Resources

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

Connect with Ashutosh Garg on Facebook

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

Get your copy of Venture Mode: Escape The Administration Trap By Finding and Unleashing Entrepreneurial Leaders

Chapters:

00:00 — Value creation vs. value capture: the core confusion

02:18 — Why profit is not the goal of the firm

05:40 — The dangers of value extraction thinking

09:05 — Pricing power vs. real customer value

12:30 — Who defines value in the market

16:10 — Why competition is the wrong focus

20:25 — Learning, adaptation, and dynamic markets

24:40 — Metrics, incentives, and distorted behavior

29:15 — Rethinking strategy around value creation

34:50 — Final thoughts: building value-driven firms