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.

The work I'm doing today gets me one step closer to the work I should be doing tomorrow. And that the way I learn this is by trying, failing, networking and experimenting. I'll stop doing that when I'm dead.

Success doesn’t always look like what we think it looks like.

I've got better things to do than to find my individuality in that particular area. But if it's important to me, I've got to seek my own path.

Harkening back to a story about my grandfather, I was lucky to attend a great high school in New York, Bronx High School of Science, which has produced more Nobel prize winners than any other high school in America.

By the time I entered this prestigious high school, my interest in formal education had already been exhausted.

If the question is, how do we best produce business people who can succeed in the post-Great Recession era, then I think the MBA programs and their connection to large companies remains intact but it's not the path to a "Business Brilliant" life. It's a path to a middle-class existence marked by large stretches of security and comfort with occasional eruptions that you're probably ill-prepared to handle. Do I sound too cynical?