The Beatles Teach Entrepreneurship Better Than Business School Does

Most programs designed to teach entrepreneurship follow a basic, flawed formula: Spend a semester writing a business plan, learn the basics of marketing and finance, bury your head in spreadsheets, pull together a PowerPoint, and then pitch your idea to a biannual business plan contest. If you’re lucky enough to win some capital, see if you can launch your idea/product/service/business. Right about then, make your first contacts with potential customers.

The rock ‘n’ roll ethos is a better one for entrepreneurs to embrace. At its core, starting a business is much more of a creative, messy discipline, full of blurry edges and governed by hunches, experimentation, and instinct. Entrepreneurship has more in common with music than science, but it is taught as though careful planning and deliberate analysis inevitably yield success.