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

We’ve been taught that business success comes from logic, prediction, and data-driven strategy. But what happens when uncertainty makes all of that break down?

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings speaks with Angus Fletcher, author of Primal Intelligence, about why entrepreneurs don’t succeed by predicting the future — but by creating it.

Angus Fletcher is uniquely qualified to draw on both neuroscience and entrepreneurial theory, and to add perspective from a field he himself pioneered, story science. He runs a special research lab at Ohio State University called Project Narrative, and its insights have been applied in US Army Special Forces, NASA, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Angus explains how the human brain is designed for uncertainty, not optimization, and why intuition, imagination, emotion, and judgment are not flaws that interfere with rationality, but essential decision-making systems for entrepreneurial action.

Key Insights:

• Why logic and prediction fail in conditions of true uncertainty
• How primal intelligence helps entrepreneurs act when the future is unknowable
• Why storytelling, not data, is the brain’s primary way of making sense of the world

If you want to rethink intelligence, leadership, and entrepreneurship for a world that can’t be predicted, this conversation offers a powerful new lens.

Resources:

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

Learn more about Angus Fletcher

Connect with Angus Fletcher on LinkedIn

Get the book "Primal Intelligence. You Are Smarter Than You Know"

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

How do you build a real business — not just a product — inside a marketplace like Amazon? And how does generative strategy change the way entrepreneurs think about scale, risk, and value creation?

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings talks with Neil Twa, founder and coach of Voltage Holdings, to break down what it really takes to build, operate, and exit successful marketplace-based companies. Neil explains his Train–Equip–Activate framework, how to separate business-building from product-picking, and why discipline, patience, and marketplace fit matter more than trends or hacks.

Key Insights:

• Why marketplaces reward systems, not spontaneity — and how most sellers fail before they truly start.
• Generative entrepreneurship vs. opportunistic entrepreneurship: building for scale rather than chasing outcomes.
• Why the goal isn’t just revenue — it's margin, defensibility, customer value, and eventually sellability.

This episode is a hands-on masterclass for entrepreneurs who want to move beyond “Amazon hustle culture” and instead build asset-backed, generative companies that endure.

Resources:

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

Connect with Neil Twa on LinkedIn

Learn more about Voltage Holdings

Get the book Almost Automated Income with FBA: Build a Profitable Lifestyle-Driven Amazon Business. Exit for Millions. Even Without Any Ecommerce Experience

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings speaks with Professor Mohammad Keyhani to explore generativity — the ability of ideas, tools, and technologies to create more ideas and innovations beyond their initial intention. Instead of seeing AI as a replacement for human creativity, Professor Keyhani explains how it can become an amplifier that unlocks exponential innovation, where small teams can produce outsize impact by enabling end-user innovation that can never be foreseen.

We discuss how entrepreneurs can design systems that produce unexpected value, why open-ended experimentation generates more upside than traditional planning, and how creativity becomes more powerful when humans collaborate with technology rather than competing with it.

Key Insights:

• Generativity creates exponential value, turning a single innovation into an ecosystem where ideas build upon ideas.
  
  
• AI augments human creativity instead of replacing it, accelerating exploration and expanding what individuals can produce.
  
  
• Entrepreneurship becomes discovery, not execution — value emerges through iteration, experimentation, and creative freedom.
  
  

If you're building products, ventures, or ideas that you want to scale beyond yourself, this episode will expand how you think about innovation in the AI era.

Resources:

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

Connect with Mohammad Keyhani on LinkedIn

Learn more about DigitVibe

Get the book The Generativity Advantage: Unpredicted Innovation at Scale

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

What does it really take to build a successful entrepreneurial business—and a successful entrepreneurial life?

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings speaks with entrepreneur and author James Harold Webb, whose career spans multiple eight-figure businesses across healthcare, diagnostics, and fitness. James shares the foundational principles behind his success: clarity of mission, disciplined execution, learning, and a commitment to serving others.

He explains why purpose—not passion—drives good decisions, how hiring self-managing people accelerates growth, and why systems are essential for building a business that operates independently of the founder. James also reflects on leadership, energy management, and the mindset required to scale without losing focus or integrity. Above all, he stresses learning: the capacity to welcome errors and missed targets and business crises as opportunities to improve.

Key Insights:

• Clarity creates direction — With a clear mission, entrepreneurs make sharper decisions and avoid emotional drift.
  
  
• Self-managed teams drive scale — Hiring people who don’t need constant direction frees leaders to focus on strategy.
  
  
• Systems create freedom — Documented processes and aligned incentives help businesses run smoothly without founder dependence.
  
  
• Failures are simply new opportunities to succeed.
  
  

If you want to build a business—and a life—rooted in purpose, discipline, and service, this conversation delivers the essentials.

Resources:

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

Connect with James Harold Webb on LinkedIn

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

Customer experience is the new gold — valuable, and becoming more valuable.

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings speaks with Sujay Saha, CEO of Cortico-X, a leader in experience design, to explore how the world’s most forward-thinking companies are reshaping customer experience in the AI era.

Sujay introduces a new discipline — experience-led architecture — where strategy, design, and technology converge to create experiences that reflect customer needs instead of reacting to them. He also explains how to measure the true ROI of experience, proving its financial impact beyond customer satisfaction scores.

Finally, he shows how AI is changing the way organizations understand people — blending data with emotion to design interactions that drive loyalty, trust, and long-term value.

Key Insights:

• Businesses should design experiences, not just processes. Experience-led businesses grow faster because they see every interaction as a design opportunity.
  
  
• Prove the ROI of experience. Customer experience is measurable — and profitable — when tied to clear business outcomes.
  
  
• Blend objective data and subjective emotion. The future of business intelligence is human intelligence — understanding not just what customers do, but how they feel, and why.

If you want to future-proof your business around people and their experiences — not just products and processes — this episode is essential listening.

Resources:

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

Connect with Sujay Saha on LinkedIn

Learn more about Cortico-X

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack