The title Larry Chiang builds his whole book around already tells you the method: What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, with one word swapped. Mark McCormack, the IMG founder who mentored Larry, wrote the original, and Larry’s version keeps the structure intact while changing Harvard to Stanford. Larry calls this move External API, plugging your project into a format that already works instead of inventing a new one from nothing.
His own line for it is blunt: change one word, Harvard to Stanford, and you have got a franchise, not a knockoff. The logic only works if the underlying format actually works, which is why he did not pick a random bestseller, he picked one built by his own mentor. Copying McCormack’s structure also meant copying what made the original useful, a business book written by someone who closed deals, not someone who studied them.
Changing the single word is the whole visible move, but the invisible move is inheriting decades of a proven format’s table of contents, pacing, and chapter logic. Larry’s claim is that most people waste months designing an original structure when a working one is sitting there, unclaimed, one word away from being theirs.
This is the same instinct behind DJ-ing two things that already exist rather than building a third thing from scratch. It is also why the book reads less like an homage and more like a sequel, a distinction the next chapter goes into directly.
None of this makes the content derivative, the frameworks inside, PQRST, house money, karma, the pen-drop close, are Larry’s own material layered onto a borrowed shell. The video below has Larry explaining the swap in his own words.
Details: Watch Larry explain the title swap
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