“In an era dominated by AI, venture mode skills are nolonger optional—they are essential life skills for thriving and constant change.”
CURTIS R. CARLSON, PH.D.,
former CEO, SRI, and professor of practice, Northeastern University
Buy Now
It’s time to take the “A” out of MBA.
Venture Mode is a bold call for an overhaul of modern business leadership and the higher education system that staffs it.
It exposes the bureaucratic mindset that dominates modern organizations—especially universities—and explains the true cost of our obsession with administration in the form of suppressed economic potential. In its place, Hunter Hastings and Mark Packard champion venture mode: a radical, entrepreneurial approach that prioritizes value creation, consumer sovereignty, and agile execution.
Venture Mode takes aim at traditional bureaucratic management and makes the case for a new kind of leadership—entrepreneurial leadership—that’s built to drive growth, unleash creativity, and outpace competitors. Drawing from both entrepreneurial (Austrian) economics and the experiences of inspiring modern business leaders, the authors lay out a provocative road map to escape the administration trap and rebuild organizations around the principles of value creation. They also outline a vision for business education that replaces the ubiquitous MBA with the MBE—master of business enterprise—to ensure that the next generation is trained in entrepreneurial leadership instead of administration.
Whether you’re a founder, an executive, or a rebel within a legacy system, this book is a call to arms. If you’re tired of the inertia of traditional business thinking and its MBA-fueled administrative mindset, then Venture Mode is your new manual—showing you how to train, nurture, and unleash entrepreneurial leaders to fuel a thriving business. The world doesn’t need more administrators. It needs entrepreneurs.
Want to Learn More?
“Venture Mode is an eye-opening expose of what’s wrong with the MBA factories. It’s a clarion call for a new way of thinking about business. More than anything, Venture Mode is the mindset shift every entrepreneur needs for the twenty-first century.”
Jeff Deist, general counsel, Monetary Metals & Co.; former president, Mises Institute
Meet Mark Packard and Hunter Hastings
Mark Packard is associate professor of management, Harry T. Mangurian Fellow of the Phil Smith Center for Free Enterprise, and research director of the Madden Center for Value Creation at Florida Atlantic University.
He obtained his PhD from the University of Missouri in 2016 with a research focus on the theory of entrepreneurship. His work focuses principally on entrepreneurial economics and the philosophical foundations of entrepreneurship theory. He is the author of more than forty peer-reviewed journal articles and academic book chapters on topics including uncertainty, judgment, value, innovation, and empathy. He is also author of the 2022 book Entrepreneurial Valuation: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Getting into the Minds of Consumers.
Hunter Hastings is a lifelong practitioner of venture mode. He was educated in England before that country adopted the MBA, and so he escaped with a master’s degree in economics. He learned the core practice of venture mode and brand building and established a global consulting practice to apply its principles across multiple companies, industries, and countries with spectacular results.
He’s been a Silicon Valley start-up CEO and a general partner in a seed-stage venture capital fund, where administration counts for nothing and agility in understanding customers and markets and designing and innovating new value propositions at speed count for everything.
Hunter provides the deep venture industry perspective that practical professionals rely on.
Praise for Venture Mode
“The MBA may be the gold standard in business credentials—but is it gold-plated nonsense? In Venture Mode, Hastings and Packard argue it’s not just overrated—it’s counterproductive. The problem lies in the ‘A’ for administration, which suffocates the ‘B’ for business. Instead of fostering value creation and customer focus, the MBA mindset breeds bureaucracy, control, and rigid routines. Managers are trained like battlefield generals, not builders of innovation. Business schools teach command and compliance, not creativity. What’s lost? The entrepreneur—the true engine of the market—who thrives by serving, not scheming.”
Per Bylund, PhD, associate professor of entrepreneurship and Johnny D. Pope Chair, Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University
“Venture Mode is a striking rethink of business education brimming with creative insight. Hunter Hastings and Mark Packard reveal how ‘administrative mode’ has suffocated innovation. Their proposal is fresh, entrepreneurial, and rooted in value creation. The authors’ thoughtful framework transforms how we think about leadership and learning. The book provides a blueprint for the future of business . . . so needed for today’s dynamic markets.”
Dennis Lopez, CEO, Global Real Estate Company
“I spent a lifetime researching how firms create long-term value, establishing that a knowledge-building culture is the key determinant of long-term performance. In contrast, the most popular theory of the firm in business schools is agency theory that focuses on ways to control the adversarial relationships between principals and agents. Hastings and Packard unpack the evolution of business school education to plainly reveal the dominance of control, i.e., administration (the ‘A’ in MBA), that guides the MBA curriculum and also to explain why we need a new alternative. My work is complementary to Hastings and Packard, with their game plan for escaping the administration trap. Venture Mode lays the foundation for a needed paradigm change for business school education, beginning with the goal to better understand the value-creation process in order to significantly improve our performance as value creators in our business careers. In reading the book’s ten chapters, I was struck by the implications of this new paradigm for living the good life. That is, living one’s life to create value for others, and in so doing, create value for yourself—earned success.”
Bartley J. Madden, former managing director, Credit Suisse HOLT, and author of Value Creation Insights: A Foundational Understanding of How Firms Build Knowledge and Create Value
“Venture Mode is a revolutionary alternative to current models of business education, rooted in the entrepreneurial pursuit of new value creation.”
Stephen Denning, former World Bank executive, Forbes senior contributor, and author of The Age of Agile
Connect
Have questions about Venture Mode?
Contact the authors using the form below.