It seems to me that what you say could be reformulated, with minimal change in what's learned, as "Get thee an MBA from a good school."
The overlap between the skills necessary to run an existing business with a known business model and to found one, even where the business model is known is not high. It might be as high as 50% for those cases where the model is known, but really, that's not high.
I assume the MBA's weak relation to functioning without supervision, i.e. being an executive, is obvious.
Did I miss or misintrepret what you said?
There may be schools in the world somewhere where the MBA study actually teaches you something useful, in my country there are none.
To run a business you don't need any of the above things, a training in middle management is enough.
The things i mentioned are specifically for organizing a company for the first time, or reorganizing an existing one. That's what i use these skills for (and with high success)
I am learning as much as possible about effective organizations, specifically large corporations and their respective businesses.
My goals are to start a successful business and to really develop the skills needed to be a great executive.
If any of you on LessWrong have studied this area I would greatly appreciate your input.
My current approach has been to read some highly recommended books and also to read as much as I can about how modern day CEOs and founders start and run their companies. I worry that some of this information is more for entertainment than for obtaining knowledge. I am also starting a company with a friend to try and put a lot of this information into practice.
I've also been using the "execute by default" idea, which, has helped immenseley in actually making progress and I have already felt that practicing this changes the way I approach problems, mostly for the better.
Some books I'm reading:
* Management by Peter Drucker
* The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
* The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
* The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
* Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
* How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Some articles I've read:
* Marc Andreesen's articles on starting a company
* Paul Graham's essays on startups
* Most things that are highly voted on on Hacker News
I have found that a lot of the information in these books is very practical, and have really raised my understanding of how large organizations work (at least intellectually). What other approaches should I be taking?
If you have any suggestions on my plan, what I'm reading, or doing, or whatever, please let me know.