Venture Mode: Escape the Administration Trap by Finding and Unleashing Entrepreneurial Leaders

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.

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.

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.