The Divide Between MBA Business Consultants and Us Real Entrepreneurs Debated

Look, just between you and I, sometimes I am irked by MBA kids right out of school who instantly become consultants and assume they know everything about business - marketing, customer service, management, finance, employee motivation, and well, basically WINNING in the free-market. You see, I am a real entrepreneur, and yes, I chose to leave school to run my company, I had no choice, I was losing money sitting in class - it made absolutely no sense to me.
After I retired before my 40th Birthday, I thought back on the decisions and choices I'd made, some was lucky timing, but mostly it was taking advantage of opportunities as they appeared. In any case, a consulting acquaintance of mind feels the opposite way on things and he is actively engaged in consulting these days. As he goes, I admit he is gaining lots of business experience. In defense of business schools he states;
"Business schools and leaders across the world owe a huge portion of their influence and their growth to him."
Yes, I understand all that, but, I couldn't let this guy off the hook, so I hit him with a little entrepreneurial "in-your-face" attitude and stated; "Do you have any clue how silly that sounds to an entrepreneur? Business Schools? Ha ha ha. Okay, if that's your thing? But entrepreneurs can hire the business graduates to set things up."
You see, an MBA doesn't make someone an innovator, thinker, or great leader, in fact, all those years of brain washing can take a heavy toll on the creative mind. Most of these kids they graduate couldn't market their way out of a paper bag and some of the business decisions they make, unbelievable how anyone could do something that stupid, I mean totally clueless stuff.
These business plans these kids come up with suck, their strategies are flawed, they can't compete in the real world, and then they have to pay off all those student loans because these business professors command such high salaries and charge $250 for a Text-Book because they have a Monopoly - Guess What? Any business can make money if it has a monopoly - that doesn't make their leaders great entrepreneurs, innovators, thinkers, or brilliant in business.
It only proves Adam Smith was right about the problems in Capitalism with incestuous relationships with government and business. But the King and the East India Tea Company showed us that, not any surprise there. My MBA acquaintance also holds Peter Drucker in the highest esteem, but I told him; Drucker's methods of setting up a business bureaucracy that actually works and can be duplicated as a system of management is okay, but most of the modern corporations today are fairly wasteful, inefficient, and rely on barriers to entry and government defensive lines to block so they can get down the field.
And still, there is the human element, look at how so many corporate boards hi-jack public companies, over pay themselves when their performance sucks. Much of all that also has to do with Drucker, and Warren's "buffet of essays" essentially shows the counter arguments for the mistakes made in corporations. I think Collins "Built to Last" - "From Good to Great" is relevant too, but I see flaws in all of this stuff really. Yes, mostly good granted but, lots of little mistakes, or less-than-BMPs as applied to the real world, nothing that I'd want to write home about.
Care to debate with me on this? I mean care to have a dialogue with a real entrepreneur? Surely, you can handle it right? Fine you are welcome to shoot me an email. Let's talk. Please consider all this.

How to Raise Kids - Child Safety in a Media Driven Society

"Give an inch and they take a mile!" We've all heard this before and if the daily actions of the many media moguls are any indication, America has lost much more than a mile. As advertisers become more aggressive in chasing down a dollar, the envelope gets ever closer to the edge. From barely there underwear to contraceptive commercials on television, to the graphically violent video games, it is just next to impossible to protect kids from these images. It makes you wonder how to raise kids to become well-adjusted without cutting them off from real life!
Even the many safe guards that are cropping up can only do so much. What can be done about our kids' friends whose parents may have a more "laid back" or even neglectful approach to parenting? No one wants to be policed 24 hours a day and who has time to do it? The last thing you want to do is become an overbearing parent. The point of parenting anyway is to provide our kids with the knowledge and guidance to make good decisions on their own.
It looks as though our society has just given way too many inches and now those inches have become miles. It will be difficult to get it back, but many family advocates have made steps in the right direction. We have to let advertisers and other consumer driven businesses know that these controversial things are not in the best interests of our youth. They are certainly no help as we struggle to understand how to raise kids.
Taking Action!
One of the most important lessons we can teach kids is to back up our words with definitive actions. This will demonstrate that we mean business in more ways that one. While it's unfortunate that it would come to this end, it really boils down to consumers being more proactive on a daily basis rather than having to take massive action after pulling our heads out of the sand a year or two down the line. I will readily shoulder my share of the blame. I knew when I raised an eyebrow at the Karmal Sutra ice cream a while back that I should have put it back on the shelf and picked up cookies and cream. It was my complacency that was part of the problem. Such complacency in large numbers means large profits for vendors, but not so great outcomes for parents wanting to do the right thing.
In essence, by buying that questionable product, I was condoning their questionable judgment. Who could really blame them when they simply wanted to make even more money and became even more aggressive in their tactics? The last thing we want to do is to rob kids of a happy childhood by eliminating everything that's fun.
If we proactively work at it on a daily basis, we can provide an environment that is not only safe and appropriate, but also fun and educational. Technology has afforded us some safeguards that can be our eyes when we can't be around to protect our kids.