The Innovator's Method

2

Leadership in the Age of Uncertainty

When MBAs come to us we have to fundamentally retrain them—nothing they learned will help them succeed at innovation.

—Scott Cook, Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit

ABOVE, WE QUOTE Scott Cook criticizing traditional management training. Is he simply being inflammatory? Perhaps. But many other innovative leaders have also criticized traditional management training. For example, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal, argued that “As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies . . . At my companies, our position is that we hire someone in spite of an MBA, not because of one.”¹ While we all recognize that management training has ...