Apple made tools that helped people express their creativity and Steve Jobs knew that so he told that story well. But Facebook makes tools that help people connect and Mark Zuckerberg is hardly a story-teller. Nevertheless, he's become a leader because his products do such a good job of solving a problem.

The bottom line: All of your investing decisions should be grounded in your own investment policy statement. By taking a "top-down" look at your finances and writing out a road map, your policy statement will add an important element of discipline to your approach.

MBA programs are underwritten by large companies and they succeed at producing future employees of large companies. In that regard, they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.

If the workers don't keep themselves current - with some assistance and guidance from their employers - then the workers who are in the legacy roles will have to be removed. That's what's so difficult.

However, there's nothing more inspiring than a company that does solve problems and those problems are captured as part of a larger story.

Because I work with entrepreneurs who own businesses, I have found Doug Tatum's No Man's Land to be a really helpful body of working knowledge. It's very applicable to most businesses that have the usual problems of growing businesses - managing people, capital, markets, etc.

As members of a minority, one that was often persecuted, that entrepreneurial perspective was burnished with a sense of "outsider" status - so not only were we committed to finding our own way of achieving success, we also grew up to believe that we'd have to fight to get whatever we wanted.