The title of this week’s book set up the whole debrief: What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, read by a room full of people arguing about street smarts versus book smarts. Larry’s own history with the book is part of the discussion, he says he changed one word, Harvard to Stanford, rather than starting from nothing. The group’s read was that the book itself argues against its own classroom, favoring what you learn from being in the room over what you learn from a case study.
That’s External API in practice, copy a proven format and change one element rather than starting from a blank page. Someone pushed back that book smarts still matter, you have to know the material before you can improvise with it. Larry’s answer, per the group’s notes, is that PQRST exists exactly for that reason, preview and read the material so the street smarts have something to work with.
One attendee framed it as prep versus performance, the book gives you the prep, the room gives you the performance. A few people admitted they’d skipped the reading some weeks and it showed the moment the conversation moved past the summary.
The debrief got specific about degrees for a while, someone asked if an MBA replaces the in-person hustle, and the room mostly said no, it just changes the vocabulary. Larry says, and this is his framing more than a settled fact, that he’s watched plenty of degrees fail to close a room and plenty of undereducated hustlers close it fast.
Nobody fully resolved the argument, which the group agreed was probably the point of assigning the chapter. Larry’s own take is in the video linked below.
Details: Watch Larry on street smarts vs book smarts
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